Global Studies Collective

PANEL DISCUSSION ON PROTECTION GAPS & RESPONSES: CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES

The Center for International Human Rights (CIHR), John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York and the New York Liaison Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are organizing an event commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the 50th Anniversary of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. The focus of this event is a discussion of the gaps in the implementation of the international protection framework for displaced and stateless persons. The event will take place at John Jay College on the sixth floor of the BMW building (555 West 57th Street), room 615/616, on Wednesday, April 27, 2011, 5:00-7:00 p.m.

WELCOMING REMARKS: Jeremy Travis, President, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and

Anne-Christine Eriksson, Deputy Director, UNHCR Liaison in New York

PANELISTS:

· Susana B. Adamo, Associate Research Scientist, Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), The Earth Institute, Columbia University

· Bill Frelick, Director, Refugee Program, Human Rights Watch

· Janice Marshall, Deputy Director, Policy and Law Pillar, Division of International Protection, UNHCR

· Lori Nessel, Professor of Law & Director, Center for Social Justice, Seton Hall University School of Law

MODERATOR: George Andreopoulos, Director, Center for International Human Rights & Professor of Political Science, John Jay College & The Graduate Center, CUNY

Forced displacement, statelessness, and mixed migratory movements remain prominent global issues in terms of their magnitude and complexities. Conflict, violence, and persecution continue to cause displacement. At the same time, a myriad of social, economic, political, and environmental factors, such as population growth, urbanization, climate change, water scarcity, and food and energy insecurity are exacerbating conflict and combining in other ways that oblige people to flee their countries. The 1951 Refugee Convention, which is central to the protection regime, has proved flexible enough to accommodate new forms of persecution, however, the complexity of the current factors affecting cross-border displacement is resulting in gaps in the response to current protection challenges. Gaps in international protection occur primarily in three ways:

· Through insufficient accessions to relevant instruments,

· through inadequate implementation of existing treaties, and

· through gaps in the existing international protection framework.

Statelessness is often referred to as the “forgotten problem,” despite the fact that citizenship is necessary for fully realizing one’s human rights. There is limited accession to the 1961 Statelessness Convention and related international treaties, there are obstacles to the acquisition of nationality and even the size of the statelessness problem is not comprehensively mapped.

New responses are needed to address the gaps and obstacles in protection of the displaced and stateless. The Panel Discussion will serve as a forum to:

· Analyze and assess situations of forced displacement which may not be covered by the 1951 Refugee Convention and explore plausible responses to the challenges posed by them.

· Analyze the statelessness problem and identify effective ways to reduce it.

RSVP by Wednesday, April 20, 2011 to CIHRJJCRSVP@gmail.com

event poster

Tags: human rights, international relations

Assessing Compliance: The Role of Human Rights Monitoring Mechanisms

The Center for International Human Rights, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The Ph.D./M.A. Program in Political Science, and The Global Studies Collective present this year’s seminar series, the purpose of which is to study how monitoring mechanisms are utilized to assess compliance with international human rights norms and standards. This subject is especially pertinent in light of the recent report submitted by the US government to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as part of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) procedures of the UN Human Rights Council, and of the near completion of the first four-year cycle of the UPR process (2008-2011). In addition, the seminar will explore how these monitoring mechanisms can be used more effectively for accountability and advocacy purposes. The seminar will examine monitoring mechanisms of charter and treaty-based bodies, as well as extra-conventional mechanisms and the supplemental monitoring of non-governmental organizations.

PLACE: Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), 365 Fifth Ave., New York, NY

TIME: 6:00-8:00 pm

SPEAKERS:

Thursday, February 10, 2011, Room C203 – Sarah Paoletti, Senior Coordinator, US Human Rights Network Universal Periodic Review Project; Practice

Associate Professor of Law & Director, Transnational Legal Clinic, University of Pennsylvania Law School, The US UPR and an Assessment of the UPR Process.

Thursday, March 10, 2011, Room C197 - Elsa Stamatopoulou, Former Chief of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues for the United Nations

Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Columbia University, Cultural Human Rights and their Monitoring.

Thursday, April 7, 2011, Room C197 – Richard Culp, Associate Professor of Public Administration, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of

New York, The Sentence Enforcement Monitoring Mechanisms of the Ad Hoc and Hybrid International Criminal Tribunals.

Tags: global governance, human rights, international relations

6pm | Room C204

Yasmeen Hassan, Deputy Director/Program Director, Equality Now, The Monitoring of Women’s Rights: An Evaluation of CEDAW, CSW, the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, and the New Working Group on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women

Tags: human rights, international relations

6 pm | Room C197

Rainer Braun, Research Analyst for Governance Metrics International (GMI); Adjunct Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs Program, A Comparison of Private Sector Labor Rights Monitoring and Traditional State-Based Human Rights Monitoring within the UN Context

Tags: human rights, international relations

HUMAN RIGHTS SEMINAR SERIES

FALL 2010 – SPRING 2011

For more information contact: Rebecca Landy at rlandy@jjay.cuny.edu

Tags: human rights, international relations

If you’re at the International Studies Association’s conference in New Orleans next week, come and see us:

Tags: foreign policy, global governance, human rights, international relations, ISA, security, transitional justice

On Saturday, I presented “The Response to Nuclear Proliferation,” a social network analysis of cooperation to prevent proliferation, at the ISSS/ISAC conference in Monterey, CA.

Abstract:

This paper uses the methods of social network analysis to discover the structural patterns of cooperation that arose in response to a global traditional security problem. It does this by mapping compulsory and institutional power relations (Barnett and Duvall 2005) among actors responding to the proliferation of nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War. For the institutional power measure, I use treaty and international agreement membership; and for the compulsory power measure, I use contractual obligations for nuclear expertise, materials, and technology. By mapping the relationships at the system level of world politics, including individual states as well as intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and transnational corporations (TNCs), this paper finds a third relation among these actors, namely, structural power. It also demonstrates how a network approach to the constitution of system level world politics can produce knowledge not available to traditional methods.

Tags: international relations, social network analysis