|
In March 2004, as International Women’s Human Rights Clinic students and faculty sat in the courtroom, the justices of the Constitutional Court of Uganda read their decisions from the bench. The next day’s Kampala Monitor newspaper sensationalized the holding—“Wives can divorce cheating husbands,” ran the banner headline—but what the court had done was spectacular: for the first time, the Constitutional Court of Uganda had used the gender equity provisions in the Ugandan Constitution to invalidate a discriminatory law.
With this decision, the court extended to wives the right to divorce based on her husband’s adultery that the old law gave only to him—a right of great importance in the era of rampant HIV/AIDS. The attorneys of Law and Advocacy for Women-Uganda had won an amazing victory. But it was a victory for the Georgetown’s International Women’s Human Rights Clinic as well. The case had begun life as a joint project between IWHRC and LAW-U, and Clinic students initially drafted the Constitutional Court petition and brief, working in tandem with the lawyers who later filed the case in Uganda.
The IWHRC was established at Georgetown Law in August 1998. The IWHRC advances women's human rights globally through partnerships with local women’s rights NGOs as well as through research and scholarship. The clinical program has provided Georgetown law students opportunities to work with the United Nations and with nongovernmental organizations in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia on human rights reports, proposed national legislation to advance women's human rights, and test case litigation to vindicate women's rights under domestic law.
The students’ work is very important: They’re working on projects that could eventually impact the lives of millions of women in Uganda and other countries in Africa.
Lecturer of Law, Makerere University (Kampala, Uganda)
Executive Director, Uganda Network on Law, Ethics, and HIV/AIDS
Susan Deller Ross, Professor
of Law, Director and Founder of IWHRC
B.A. Knox College; J.D. New York University
Susan Deller Ross is Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and Director and Founder of the IWHRC. Before joining the Georgetown Law faculty in 1983, she was Special Counsel for Sex Discrimination Litigation to the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Previously, she was Clinical Director of the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, and an attorney with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She has filed numerous amicus curiae briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court on women's rights issues and has testified at a number of U.S. congressional hearings concerning sex discrimination. She was one of the attorneys who represented Anita Hill in the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas congressional hearings. In addition to founding and teaching in the International Women’s Human Rights Clinic, she has taught Domestic Relations Law and Advocacy and Employment Discrimination Law and Advocacy in Georgetown’s Clinical Programs. She has also taught International and Comparative Law on the Rights of Women, Equal Employment Opportunity Law, Family Law, and Gender and the Law.
Professor Ross has published widely in the area of women's rights. Her recent books include Women’s Human Rights: International and Comparative Law on the Rights of Women (forthcoming 2007) and Sex Discrimination and the Law: History, Practice & Theory (co-authored with Barbara Allen Babcock, Ann E. Freedman, Wendy Webster Williams, Rhonda Copelon, Deborah Rhode, and Nadine Taub) (New York: Little, Brown and Company 2d ed. 1996). Her recent articles on international women’s human rights include:
Professor Ross also speaks regularly to audiences around the world. Her recent presentations include:
- Implementation and Enforcement of International Women’s Human Rights Treaties
University of Tana
Antananarivo, Madagascar
- Implementation and Enforcement of International Women’s Human Rights Treaties
Guatemala Judicial School
- Advancing Women’s Human Rights Through Legal Change: The Value of Gender Expertise
Keynote address for Inaugural Program, Master’s Degree in Gender,
Women’s Rights, and Access to Justice, San Carlos University Law School
Guatemala City, Guatemala
- Expert Consultation on Litigation:
Using International Human Rights Treaties to Enforce Reproductive Rights
Center for Reproductive Rights
New York, NY
- Advancing Women’s Human Rights Through Equal Protection and Equality Guarantees in National, Regional, and International Human Rights Instruments
Global Alliance for Justice Education Inaugural Conference
Kerala, India
- Legal Mechanisms to Remedy Discrimination
Conference on Institutional Mechanisms for the Protection of Human Rights at the Lithuanian Constitutional Court
- Legal Remedies Under U.S. Law for Sexual Harassment and Domestic Violence
Police Academy
Vilnius, Lithuania
- Foreign and International Experience in the Protection of Women's Rights
Keynote address to the Mongolian Women's Rights Seminar
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
Tzili Mor, Teaching Fellow
B.A., University of California, Los Angeles; J.D. & Master of Science in Foreign Service (International Relations), Georgetown University
Tzili Mor returns to Washington following international human rights projects conducted in several regions of the world. Most recently, she completed a year-long project with Amnesty International’s secretariat focusing on the particularized challenges and risks faced by women human rights defenders, including those working in closed societies or on issues deemed “controversial.”
As a regional Human Rights Specialist for ABA CEELI, she worked in Central Asia to promote the use of international human and women’s rights standards in domestic practice. Based on her previous experience with UN human rights committees, she was part of an unprecedented collaboration between seven Kyrgyz NGOs united to author an alternative report to the CEDAW committee, the bulk of which was adopted by the committee. She also worked to initiate the first Kyrgyz national network of trained courtroom monitors.
As an attorney with the International Program for the Center for Reproductive Rights, she researched, documented, and analyzed laws, policies, and practices that affect the rights of girls and women. As part of the Center’s effort to overturn the Global Gag Rule, she oversaw fact finding missions documenting the impact of this US foreign policy on health, speech, and association rights in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Peru. She was also involved in launching the Center’s work on HIV/AIDS timed around the first-ever UNGASS on HIV/AIDS in 2001 and accompanied by two co-authored publications, UNGASS on HIV/AIDS: Women’s Empowerment Embraced, Reproductive Rights Slighted, and HIV/AIDS: Reproductive Rights on the Line.
She also guided the production of a comprehensive report by the Mossawa Center in Haifa titled, The Palestinian Arab Citizens of Israel: Status, Opportunities & Challenges for an Israeli-Palestinian Peace, and accompanied a local NGO observer mission during the Palestinian Authority’s first presidential election following the death of Yassir Arafat in 2005. |
