Stanford University

Human Rights

Why Abolish the Death Penalty? Domestic and Transnational Factors

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Dongwook Kim's research interests include the politics of human rights; international law and organizations; transnational activism; policy diffusion; event history and count models

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Dong Wook Kim

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CDDRL Hewlett Fellow 2009-2010
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Dongwook Kim received his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in August 2009. His dissertation, entitled Institutionalizing Human Rights: The United Nations, Nongovernmental Organizations and National Human Rights Institutions, examined why states adopt the UN idea of national human rights institutions and hence create a permanent and independent state institution to promote and protect human rights. The dissertation argued that in the human rights issue area characterized by low cross-border externalities, sovereignty-bound international organizations, and weak self-enforcement by states, human rights NGOs are especially important for states' policy adoption. In his dissertation, Kim specified three causal mechanisms linking NGOs to global diffusion and demonstrated that the UN idea gains special traction in the states connected with strong human rights NGO activism by using event history analysis and case studies.

During the postdoctoral fellowship at CDDRL (2009-2010), Kim will examine the abolition of the death penalty, Amnesty International's letter-writing campaigns called ‘Urgent Action Appeals,' and the effectiveness of national human rights institutions. He will also expand his unique quantitative data on international human rights NGOs to cover the entire period from 1948 to 2009.

Dong Wook Kim Fellow Speaker CDDRL
Seminars

12th Annual United Nations Association Film Festival Session VI

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The United Nations Association Film Festival was originally conceived to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 12th UNAFF will be held from October 17-25, 2009 in Palo Alto, Stanford University, East Palo Alto and San Francisco. This year, the theme is Energy and the World, reflecting the myriad of problems we encounter saving energy around the world and to seek awareness and solutions — through film — to better our lives and save our planet.

This year's festival also features a powerful film on the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Launched in 2002, the ICC is the first international tribunal of its kind, a permanent criminal court created to prosecute individuals, no matter how powerful, for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. The Reckoning follows the dynamic and charismatic Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo, Deputy Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and Senior Trial Attorney Christine Chung as they issue arrest warrants for the Lord’s Resistance Army leaders in Uganda, put four Congolese warlords on trial at The Hague, challenge the UN Security Council to support the Court’s call for an arrest warrant for the President of Sudan on charges of genocide, and shake up the Colombian justice system. As the Prosecutor tells us, he has to take this tiny court, created by dreamers, and turn it into reality. He has a mandate to prosecute perpetrators around the world for the worst crimes imaginable, whether they are warlords or military brass or heads of state, even as they continue to wreak havoc. But he has no police force—he needs to pressure the international community to follow through, to muster political will. Will it succeed? How will the world make sure that the Prosecutor can fulfill his mandate?

Bechtel Conference Center

Helen Stacy Principal Investigator, Program on Human Rights; Senior Fellow at Freeman Spogli Institute, Senior Lecturer, School of Law and 2009-2010 Faculty Fellow, Clayman Institute for Gender Research Panelist
Conferences
Program on Human Rights

Screening of documentary about physicist Joseph Rotblat at UN Film Festival

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The United Nations Association Film Festival was originally conceived to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 12th UNAFF will be held from October 17-25, 2009 in Palo Alto, Stanford University, East Palo Alto and San Francisco. This year, the theme is Energy and the World, reflecting the myriad of problems we encounter saving energy around the world and to seek awareness and solutions — through film — to better our lives and save our planet.

When the U.S. government brought the world’s greatest scientists together to build the first atomic bomb, nuclear physicist Joseph Rotblat was among them. But his conscience would not allow him to continue, and he became the only member of the Manhattan Project to leave on moral grounds. Branded a traitor and spy, Rotblat went from designing atomic bombs to researching the medical uses of radiation. Together with Bertrand Russell he helped create the modern peace movement, and eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize. The Strangest Dream tells the story of Joseph Rotblat, the history of nuclear weapons, and the efforts of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs—an international movement Rotblat co-founded—to halt nuclear proliferation. The first Pugwash conference took place in the small Nova Scotia fishing village from which it draws its name. This film brings to light the group’s behind-the-scenes role in defusing some of the tensest moments of the Cold War. The story takes us from the site of the first nuclear test, in New Mexico, to Cairo, where contemporary Pugwash scientists meet under the cloud of nuclear proliferation, and to Hiroshima, where we see survivors of the first atomic attack. The Strangest Dream demonstrates the renewed threat represented by nuclear weapons, while encouraging hope through the example of morally engaged scientists and citizens.

  • 3:00 p.m. Film screening, "The Strangest Dream" (1989, Director: Eric Bednarski)
  • 4:30 p.m. Panel, "The Ethics of Nuclear Technology"
  • 5:30 p.m. Reception with filmmakers

Bechtel Conference Center

Burt Richter Panelist
Martin Hellman Professor Emeritus, Electrical Engineering, Stanford University Panelist
Conferences

Program on Human Rights launched at Stanford

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In a new Stanford endeavor, FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law has joined with the Bowen H. McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society to launch an interdisciplinary Program on Human Rights. Introducing CDDRL's latest program, Director Larry Diamond noted that "today's human rights interact with a number of other urgent global issues including climate change, immigration, security, women's rights, poverty, and child soldiers" to name but a few. The campus-wide Human Rights Program builds on the work of CDDRL's Program on Global Justice by bridging the normative and the empirical.

The October launch featured an interdisciplinary panel on human rights, "Bridging Theory and Practice", combining the work and insights of Senior Law Lecturer, FSI Senior Fellow and Human Rights Program Coordinator Helen Stacy, who also served as moderator, Political Science Professor Terry L. Karl, Stanford Law School Professor Jenny Martinez, Anthropology Professor Jim Ferguson, and Civil and Environmental Professor Ray Levitt.

Observing that each of the panelists works adeptly across several disciplinary fields, Program Coordinator Helen Stacy noted that "they dynamically cycle between high theory and everyday action in a constant arbitrage between principle and practice."

Invoking the French philosopher Michel Foucault, Jim Ferguson observed that "the world is a dangerous place" and we need to be careful, watchful, vigilant, and realistic. Just as "If you want peace, work for justice," he said, "If you want human rights, work to overcome economic inequalities."

A second session featured Philosophy Professor Debra Satz, Director of the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, who introduced the new Undergraduate Human Rights Summer Fellowships, which will allow four undergraduates to immerse themselves in a summer-long internship with a leading human rights organization.

A final keynote address by pediatrician Paul H. Wise, the Richard Behrman Professor in Child Health and a core faculty member of the FSI's Stanford Health Policy center, addressed the aspirational, "Between the Concrete and the Clouds: Living Your Human Rights Principles."

Wise's professional life has been devoted to the real human rights of real children by improving child health-care practices and policies in developing countries. Active in child health projects in India, South Africa, and Latin America, Wise spends each summer in an indigenous village in Guatemala, where he teaches and provides needed care at the village clinic.

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Pluralism and Global Justice

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Cristina Lafont is presently a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Frankfurt . Habilitation, University of Frankfurt. She specializes in German philosophy, particularly hermeneutics and critical theory. She has also published in philosophy of language and contemporary moral and political philosophy. She is author of The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy (MIT Press, 1999) and Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosure (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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Christina Lafont Professor, Department of Philosophy Speaker Northwestern University
Workshops
Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

Clean Trade vs. the Resource Curse

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Profile
Leif Wenar is Chair of Ethics at King's College London.

After earning his Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Stanford, he went to Harvard to study with John Rawls, and wrote his dissertation on property rights with Robert Nozick and T.M. Scanlon.

Leif Wenar works in moral, political and legal theory. His most abstract theoretical work concerns the nature and justification of rights. Most of his scholarly writings have focused on the work of John Rawls. Much of his current research focuses on international issues such as war, human rights, severe poverty, development aid, and inequalities among nations.  He has recently written on the global trade in natural resources such as oil and diamonds, and how to stop the damaging effects of the "resource curse." Most of his published work is available online at  wenar.info.

He has been a Visiting Professor and a Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, a Fellow of the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at The Murphy Institute of Political Economy, and a Fellow of the Program on Justice and the World Economy at The Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs.

Research
Leif Wenar works in moral, political and legal theory. Much of his current research focuses on international issues such as war, human rights, severe poverty, development aid, and inequalities among nations. His most abstract theoretical work concerns the nature and justification of rights. Most of his scholarly writings have focused on the work of John Rawls, and he co-edited the autobiographical volume Hayek on Hayek.

He has recently written on the global trade in natural resources such as oil and diamonds, and how to stop the damaging effects this trade has on low-income countries. His work on this topic can be found at www.cleantrade.org.

Attached is the paper for the seminar. Of course there's no expectation that you'll want to read the whole thing, so here's a short guide to what might be most interesting for our time together:
  • The main policy proposals in the project can be gotten from sections 1-14, skipping the 'Question' sections. (These sections cover the material in "Property Rights and the Resource Curse"; if you've read that article you'll not miss too much by skipping these sections.)
  • The final section, A14, tries to build on Seema's excellent work on loan sanctions;
  • Sections 7, 8, 9, and A13 touch on the issues of the standards for
    disqualifying regimes from selling resources/accessing credit, and the
    agencies that could rule on whether these standards have been met.

The rest of the material is just there in case it interests you.

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Leif Wenar Professor of Ethics Speaker Kings College London
Workshops
Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice
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