The Program on Human Rights (PHR) at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is looking forward to an exciting quarter with a continued focus on human trafficking and human rights education.  We encourage you to read our newsletter below to learn more about our exciting courses, research initiatives, and new staff on board for the spring quarter.  

Human Trafficking:

• • PHR Director Helen Stacy is co-teaching Human Trafficking: Historical, Legal, and Medical Perspectives, an interdisciplinary course that was developed over the last year in consultation with Faculty College. The course will explore all forms of human trafficking including labor and sex trafficking, child soldiers and organ harvesting. Professor Stacy’s office hours this quarter are Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2:30 – 4 p.m. at Encina Hall, room C148.

    

• • PHR has launched a new research project on human trafficking in Asia. The project started over spring break and was rolled out at Stanford’s campus in Beijing, China.  The new research project will focus on cross border trafficking between Burma, Thailand and China.  Look out for more news of this exciting new project in the weeks to come.

Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship:  PHR has selected four undergraduate fellows at Stanford who will complete internships this summer in Bihar, India (human trafficking education); Ahmedabad, India (the Self Employed Women’s Association-SEWA); Guatemala (KidsAlive International); and Amman, Jordan (Visualizing Justice).  The fellows are currently preparing for their summer positions. Look out for more details on our newest Human Rights Fellows next week!

Stanford Human Rights Education Inititative (SHREI), a partnership with International Comparative Area studies and Stanford Program in Inter-Cultural Education continues this quarter, with the community college fellows preparing their lesson plans.  This year’s topics are human trafficking and the media.  For more information please click here.

New Faces at PHR: The program is excited to welcome Jessie Brunner as the new PHR assistant, carrying out many of the tasks previously undertaken by Nadejda Marques, who departed PHR at the end of Winter quarter.  Following her undergraduate studies in journalism and Spanish at U.C. Berkeley, Brunner spent six years in the professional arena, first as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and then in public relations/marketing for two nonprofit organizations.  She came to Stanford University this fall to undertake her master’s degree in international policy studies, concentrating in global justice. Her professional pursuits have long been coupled with passionate activism in the arenas of human rights advocacy, conflict resolution in Israel, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and poverty reduction.  Brunner was an active participant in the winter quarter’s Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Speaker Series: The International Criminal Court: The Next Decade.  Brunner recently returned from a study trip to Rwanda where she delved into issues of human rights, governance, and economic development through meetings with government officials, NGOs, and the business community.     

“The recent news of General Bosco Ntaganda’s surrender to the International Criminal Court where he is standing trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity certainly urges reflection on last quarter’s Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Speaker Series, in which students and community members alike heard from renowned experts both within and outside the Court,” said Brunner.

Brunner can be contacted at jbrunner@stanford.edu.  She will hold office hours on Mondays and Wednesdays from 12 – 2 p.m. at Encina Hall, room C148.

For the latest in human rights news and to learn more about exciting events on campus, please follow us on Facebook.

We’re looking forward to engaging and interacting with you during the spring quarter!

SHERKOLE, ETHIOPIA – The white jeep bumps along past red-clay villages dotted with thatched huts and waving children gathered in the shadows of the mango trees. The Stanford students are quiet as they observe the foreign landscape and grip their laminated design maps and exhaustive lists of questions. They’ve been preparing for this day for months.

The head of the UN refugee program in Ethiopia had just cautioned: changing the way we do things won’t be easy.

“First go see the realities on the ground,” said J.O. Moses Okello, the chief representative in Ethiopia for the Asylum Access, the global agency set up in 1951 to help those uprooted after World War II. “You do not have to reinvent the wheel. And yet, with all the new technology today, I suppose the sky is your limit. Come back to us with some good ideas.”

The students would soon learn that good ideas from the classroom don’t always translate to doable ideas on the ground.

“I can’t believe we’re finally here,” says Devorah West, a second-year master’s student in international policy studies, as she takes in the parched Ethiopian plains. Her team is focused on helping local communities share some of the benefits from the camps, while avoiding the pitfalls.

This long-awaited research trip emerged from a dialogue and collaboration between Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the UNHCR. A UN official approached CISAC Co-Director Tino Cuéllar a year ago about exploring ideas to better protect and support more than 42 million refugees, internally displaced and stateless people worldwide.

These early discussions led to a multidisciplinary partnership involving CISAC, students from across the Stanford campus and at the Hassno-Platner Institute of Design. Professors, NGOs such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (IRC) and International Rescue Committee, physicians, architects and other professionals have all been eager to volunteer time and expertise.

Now, four students from Cuéllar’s Law School class, “Rethinking Refugee Communities,” have traversed the globe to test out their technology and design theories. Representing teams from the class co-taught by Leslie Witt of the Silicon Valley global design firm, IDEO, some 25 students spent the winter quarter consulting and brainstorming about ways to advance camp communications; food security and economic self-sufficiency; local community relations; and the complicated process of setting up camps for thousands of exhausted and heartsick refugees.

“It’s a long way from the classroom. I just don’t know what to expect,” West says, climbing down from the jeep with the black-and-yellow IRC logo. The NGO, founded in 1933 at the request of Albert Einstein to help those suffering under Hitler, has facilitated the Stanford visit.

The students were chosen by their classmates as the first to represent Stanford out in the field, for a project CISAC intends to build out for years to come. Parth Bhakta and Ben Rudolph are symbolic systems and computer science seniors, respectively, looking at camp communications and early camp registration. Jessica Miranda is another second-year master’s student in international policy studies who intends to take back to her team details about small-scale farming and ways they might help refugees become more self-sufficient.

First Camp

After two days of travel from San Francisco to Ethiopia and then two days of briefings in the capital, the students take an Ethiopian Airlines prop plane from Addis Ababa to the western town of Assosa. They arrive in Sherkole, a village 30 miles from the Sudanese border.

The students get their first dose of African celebration – and a hard dose of reality.

They have arrived on International Women’s Day, so the UN, IRC and numerous Ethiopian government agencies and international NGOs are celebrating in the camp’s main square. It’s 90-plus degrees and loud drums and horns compete with dancers and speeches about the need to recognize the accomplishment of women. It’s a joyous and hopeful scene.

But when the students gather in a nearby community center with two dozen refugees, they get an earful about the lack of communications, lost ration cards, displaced children and rivalries in the camp filled mostly with Sudanese fleeing fighting in the Blue Nile state in southeastern Sudan. Conflict in that region re-erupted in 2011 between the Sudanese army and rebels allied to the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, the dominant force in newly independent South Sudan.

“I have food. I have a wife. I have everything I need – but I have no freedom,” says Faruk Baba, a 34-year-old Sudanese living in the camp for 13 years. He met and married his wife and had four children in the camp that opened in 1997 and today houses some 7,600 refugees.

Though having spent more than a third of his life in Sherkole, Baba tells Rudolph and Bhakta that he longs to go home. He’s waited for more than a year for his repatriation documents. Can the students help him secure those documents? Can they give him freedom?

Seated in a circle on small stools in the clay-walled center painted lemon yellow and beastly hot with its corrugated tin roof, Rudolph and Bhakta gently tell the refugees they are not here to help them with their immediate woes; they are college students conducting research.

They turn back to questions about how the refugees communicate back home and whether the registration process was smooth when they arrived. But the refugees want to vent.

An old man with glasses shakes his head and says he’s been waiting nine months for his ration card; a woman with deep half-moon tribal scars on her cheeks clucks at the students and ignores their questions: “As refugees, we have no rights. We just do what they tell us to do.”

A SlideRocket presentation of the Ethiopia Trip 

Rudolph and Bhakta plow ahead. Bhakta talks about his scheme to set up radio transmitters on mobile broadcast kiosks that would allow them to communicate with the UNHCR. Rudolph explains his software designed to promote two-way communication between the UNHCR and refugees using mobile phone technology.

But Ethiopia has a monopoly on the cellular network, so the government might not be open to the new technology. Further, the refugees note, many of them have no access to mobile phones.

A young Congolese man then voices what many refugees likely think:

“We’re always receiving guests here and giving them information, but you never give us any solutions,” says Steven Murama, who says he fled eastern Congo three years ago, walking through Rwanda and Kenya and then onto Ethiopia after his village was attacked by one of the rebel groups terrorizing Congo’s South Kivu province.

“We are not kids to be toyed with out here.”

The students, somewhat dazed by jetlag and heat, reply that they have come with good intentions and hope to work on long-term solutions that may one day help the next generation of refugees.

“It was really tough speaking with the refugees initially,” Bhakta says. “You begin to realize that there are no easy solutions, despite all the work we did in the classroom.”

Yet many one-on-one meetings with refugees and Ethiopians in surrounding communities would prove fruitful over the next two days. 

“You read about refugees and their living situation in textbooks and articles, but actually visiting a camp makes it come to life; it puts things in perspective,” Rudolph says. “If it was easy to apply technology to the refugee situation, then there’d be no challenge. What’s the fun in that?”

Next: Devorah West sits beneath a mango tree to talk to a local village head about how the refugees have impacted their lives.

Africa is witnessing a period of impressive economic transformation. Small business growth and technological innovation are bridging the development divide and lifting many out of poverty. Foreign investment has been pouring into the continent, viewed by analysts as one of the few remaining emerging market economies. Google's Eric Schmidt recently traveled to Africa on a technology tour citing Kenya's impressive gains in the ICT sector.

But the headlines and statistics fail to account for the large number left behind in the continent's race to develop. Social problems continue to plague African societies and threaten to reignite tensions, stalling long-term progress.

To address these challenges, grassroots leaders are working across Africa to introduce new models and practices to give voice and representation to marginalized groups, many of which include: women, children, and rural populations.

Referred to as "social entrepreneurs" these individuals work in partnership with local communities to use non-conventional approaches and innovative designs to address development challenges. Unlike traditional business entrepreneurs, their goal is not financial profit but societal gain.

In an effort to harness the collective expertise of these global change-makers, Stanford University's Program on Social Entrepreneurship was launched in 2011 to bring practitioners inside the classroom and on campus.

In April, three social entrepreneurs working to advance social, economic, and political change in Africa will spend the spring quarter in residency at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Turning justice on its head

After emerging from a decade-long civil war, Sierra Leone has been cited as a successful model of post-conflict development and stability. However, the formal justice system has continued to exclude large numbers of the country's rural population who continue to seek customary legal systems of representation. Recognizing this problem, Simeon Koroma co-founded Timap (which translates to "Stand Up" in the national Krio language) for Justice in 2003 to combine the best of both systems.

Through a network of highly trained paralegals and mediators located in 19 offices across Sierra Leone, Timap for Justice is helping clients navigate both systems to seek justice and address community-level concerns. To date, Timap for Justice has represented over 20,000 clients who are often the victims of human rights abuses at the hands of multinational corporations. Their innovative grassroots justice model together with Koroma's efforts to grow the organization has led Timap for Justice to be recognized on a national and regional level.

Transforming ripples into waves

Gemma Bulos - a California native - did not know the impact water would have on her life until she witnessed the world water crisis first-hand while traveling the world on a global peace campaign. A self described "accidental social entrepreneur," Bulos learned by actively listening to the needs of the local community and learning from their experiences. She co-founded A Single Drop for Safe Water in the Philippines to empower local communities to plan, implement, and manage community-driven water and sanitation solutions.

Recognizing the important role women play in the success of water projects, Bulos started her second entrepreneurial venture - the Global Women's Water Initiative (GWWI) - to work with rural women in East Africa to build simple water and sanitation technologies. Tailoring each project to the community's needs, GWWI equips women with the technical skills to build rainwater harvesting tanks, water treatment technologies, and toilets. All projects are constructed using locally appropriate and affordable technologies. Trainings have helped to spur micro-enterprise development, and have provided over 15,000 people with clean water and sanitation solutions.

Putting children's rights first

Malawi made international headlines as the destination for pop singer Madonna's adoption of two young children, but the country has made little progress in protecting the rights of their youngest citizens. Maxwell Matewere founded the organization, Eye of the Child, to advocate for children who are victims of forced marriage, child labor, abuse, and sexual exploitation.

Matewere's innovative model uses litigation, public and policy advocacy, and training of community organizations to lead national campaigns against child abuse. Since 2010, the organization has provided free legal aid to 47 cases of forced marriages, 13 cases of arranged marriages, and rescued 21 children from early marriages.

Through his work leading Eye of the Child, Matewere has challenged powerful actors in business and government to advocate for new practices and legislation to protect the interests and well-being of young children. In recognition of his work, Matewere was appointed as Malawi's special law commissioner to develop a national policy for anti-human trafficking and adoption.

Informing theory with practice

During the spring quarter, the three social entrepreneurs will participate in an undergraduate course (IR142) examining how social entrepreneurs advance democracy, development, and justice. Taught by Kathleen Kelly Janus, a lecturer at Stanford, the course will combine academic theory with the social entrepreneurs practical experience to present a more inclusive model of social change. Students will also be encouraged to partner with social entrepreneurs on service learning projects.

Social entrepreneurs will engage the broader Stanford community through a series of speaking roles on campus during the academic quarter. They will also have the time and space to pursue their own research initiatives, contemplate the next steps on their journey as social change leaders, and document their own models of social change.

CDDRL's Program on Social Entrepreneurship was founded in 2011 by Kavita Ramdas, the former head of the Global Fund for Women and the current representative of the Ford Foundation in India. The program is now led by Faculty Director Deborah L. Rhode, a professor of law at Stanford Law School and affiliate faculty member at CDDRL.

This spring marks the third cycle of the program, which has welcomed previous social entrepreneurs from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Malaysia, Palestine, South Africa, and the San Francisco Bay Area, who together work on critical problems of democracy, development, and social justice in their communities.

For more information on the program, please visit: pse.stanford.edu.