The practicum, taught by Michelle Liu, Awista Ayazi, and Melody Vidmar, is partnering this year with Our Children’s Trust (“OCT”), a non-profit public interest law firm representing the Lighthiser plaintiffs, to support their mission to secure the human rights of children to a healthy environment through strategic litigation. For students, the two-day evidentiary hearing was an extraordinary experiential learning opportunity, connecting their intensive classroom studies with the realities of strategic litigation and the lived experiences of youth on the frontlines of climate change.
Africa’s highest human rights court has granted the Human Rights Institute (“HRI”) leave to participate as amicus curiae in its highly anticipated advisory opinion on the protection of human and peoples’ rights in the context of the climate crisis.
Last week, The New York Times reported on Lighthiser v. Trump, a high-stakes challenge to three executive orders expanding fossil fuel use. Just days later, students in the Human Rights Advocacy in Action Practicum were in the Missoula, Montana federal…
Georgetown Law announced today that Agnieszka Fryszman, L’96, one of the nation’s preeminent human rights litigators and founder of the Human Rights practice at Cohen Milstein, has been appointed the 2025–2026 Robert F. Drinan, S.J., Chair in Human Rights.
In July 2025, approximately 200 years after the imposition of the so-called “Independence Debt,” the Human Rights Institute joined over sixty human rights organizations, including the Kolectif Ayisyen Afwodesandan (KAAD), and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), in sending an open letter to French officials demanding urgent repayment of the “debt.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Human Rights Institute (HRI) at Georgetown Law, the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), and the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) have jointly made two significant submissions to the United Nations—one…
On March 15, the Human Rights Institute and Hoyas for Human Rights, an undergraduate student club on the Hilltop Campus, co-hosted the 2024 Human Rights Summit. This year's Summit theme was "Working Towards Justice: Human Rights in the 21st Century."
On Jan. 31 the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security (GIWPS) mourned and commemorated the 10-year anniversary of the Yazidi genocide committed by ISIS with a panel titled “Rebuilding After Atrocities: Accountability and Reconstruction in Sinjar and Beyond.”
HRI is recruiting for our 2024-2026 Dash-Muse Teaching Fellow!
The Human Rights Institute is thrilled to welcome Soledad Garcia Munoz to Georgetown Law as the 2023-2024 Robert F. Drinan, S.J., Chair in Human Rights! García Muñoz has just concluded two terms of exemplary service as the inaugural Special Rapporteur on Economic, Social, Cultural, and Environmental Rights for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Last January, Alexis Shanes, L’24, found herself in Erbil, a city in Northern Iraq. “It was the most astonishing experience, one I never thought I would be able to have in law school,” she said.
