Karl C. Procaccini
INTRODUCTION
This note is motivated by a basic premise: Governments must be held accountable for creating refugee flows. There are over nine million refugees in the world today who have been persecuted at home and forced to seek asylum abroad. The human cost of this massive upheaval and migration is incalculable. By definition, refugees have a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country based on their fundamental beliefs or characteristics. Refugees flee persecution, armed conflicts, and brutality. In their new host countries, refugees face numerous challenges adapting to …

Thomas E. Davies
I. INTRODUCTION
The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide criminalizes not only genocide itself, but also other acts including direct and public incitement to genocide. The criminalization of incitement to genocide serves at least two important goals. First, it helps to ensure that the people who may bear the greatest responsibility for bringing about genocide — like Hassan Ngeze, the newspaper publisher who “poisoned the minds of his readers, and by his words and deeds caused the death of thousands of innocent civilians,” …

Molly Beutz Land
The same technologies that groups of ordinary citizens are using to write operating systems and encyclopedias are fostering a quiet revolution in another area—social activism. On websites such as Avaaz.org and Wikipedia, citizens are forming groups to report on human rights violations and organize
email writing campaigns, activities formerly the prerogative of professionals. Because the demands of human rights work often require organizations to professionalize in order to be successful in their advocacy, human rights provides an ideal case study for evaluating the effect of lowered barriers to online …

Charles W. Gould
INTRODUCTION: A GATHERING STORM
Every year the world witnesses the forces of nature running amok: an earthquake, flood, or hurricane of unusual force devastates a community, capturing the attention of the world. While no one in its path can expect to escape the wrath of such disasters, and wealth is no talisman, disasters especially afflict the poor. About half of those who have been killed by natural disasters from 1994–2003 were inhabitants of low-development countries, with less than 10% coming from high-development countries. Even in developed countries, disasters have …

By Senator Edward M. Kennedy
The 1946 Constitution of the World Health Organization declares that the highest attainable standard of health is a fundamental right of every human being, without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition. Two years later, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of all persons and their families, and the right to medical care, necessary social services, and security in times of …

The Harvard Human Rights Journal was founded in 1988 and has since endeavored to be a site for a broad spectrum of scholarship on international and domestic human rights issues. The Journal publishes a range of original scholarly works on human rights issues of contemporary relevance, and in the past has featured pieces on subjects as diverse as refugee asylum law, female prisoner’s rights, rights of child soldiers, oil and the role of the World Bank, detention, rendition, and domestic violence.
We encourage legal and other academic scholars to …