Summary
Almost 30 years ago, our Founder and Co-Faculty Director Eric Stover turned a two-person program at the UC Berkeley Townsend Center for the Humanities into the Human Rights Center — an institution that has helped define some of the field’s most remarkable achievements by pursuing justice through science, technology, and law. We are grateful for the opportunity to reflect on our legacy of work over the last three decades, and strategize how we will seize the next 30 years to continue our investigations of human rights violations, support survivors and their communities, and bring those responsible to justice
Over the past year, we have achieved the following accomplishments:
- Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, joined us on Berkeley’s campus to launch the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations in all the languages of the United Nations.
- We launched a Climate Justice program to address the human impacts of climate change. We have initiated projects to create policy and industry recommendations to better protect the human rights of people in climate-affected communities.
- Our Co-Faculty Director Eric Stover was awarded the 2024 AAAS Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility in honor of his lifetime of work investigating mass atrocities, holding perpetrators accountable, and promoting justice for victims and their families.
- Our Health and Human Rights program started a new project on increasing protections for LGBTQI+ refugee youth in humanitarian settings, and continued their evaluation of an innovative foster care program in San Francisco centering youth at risk of commercial sexual exploitation.
- Our Technology, Law & Policy program continued to investigate cyber attacks in Ukraine, and present their findings to key partners in the international criminal justice space.
- Our student fellows spent the summer working with local human rights organizations on six continents. They supported their host institutions in the fields of law, journalism, public health, public policy, and information technology.