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Siddharth Kara. 6/13/2014. “A trafficked sex slave could be sold off as a virgin for $7000..a child slave for $20.” The Guardian. See full videoAbstract

A trafficked sex slave could be sold off as a virgin for $7000...a child slave for $20.

 

Siddharth Kara, Harvard University fellow and author of three books on modern-day slavery, talks about the profits and losses of slavery and what he has learned from 12 years of research into trafficking, across six continents.

Watch the video here. 



Alberto Mora. 8/5/2016. “Fighting Terrorism - and the urge to ignore our basic American principles.” The Washington Post. See full text.Abstract

Op-Ed by Carr Center Senior Fellow Alberto Mora.

 

 

In late 2002, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service uncovered evidence that detainees were being abused during interrogations at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Concerned about the lawlessness and the professional incompetence of the interrogators, they sought out a senior attorney in the Defense Department’s office of general counsel. Nothing could be done, the attorney blandly informed them. “The decision has been taken,” he said, “and, anyway, if the public were to find out, no one would care.”



Steven Livingston and Sushma Raman. 2/21/2017. “Conference Report: Technology & Human Rights in the 21st Century.” Technology & Human Rights in the 21st Century. Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA: Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. See full text.Abstract

Technology and Human Rights Conference Report

Technology & Human Rights in the 21st Century:

 

On November 3 - 4, 2016, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School hosted a symposium that aimed to:

1. Strengthen collaboration among stakeholders working on issues at the intersection of human rights and technology and

2. Deepen our understanding of the nature of collaboration among different technical and scientific communities working in human rights.

The symposium brought together practitioners and academics from different industries, academic disciplines and professional practices. Discussion centered on three clusters of scientific and technical capacities and the communities of practice associated with each of them. These clusters are:

• Geospatial Technology: The use of commercial remote sensing satellites, geographical information systems (GIS), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and geographical positioning satellites (GPS) and receivers to track events on earth.
   
• Digital Networks: The use of digital platforms to link individuals in different locations working towards a common goal, such as monitoring digital evidence of human rights violations around the world. It often involves crowdsourcing the collection of data over digital networks or social computation – the analysis of data by volunteers using digital networks.
   
• Forensic Science: The collection, preservation, examination and analysis of evidence of abuses and crimes for documentation, reconstruction, and understanding for public and court use. Among the more prominent evidential material in this area includes digital and multimedia evidence as well as corporal and other biologic evidence.  When considering the use of digital technologies, we might say that forensic science involves the recoding of material objects into binary code. This domain includes massively parallel DNA sequencing technologies as well as document scanning and data management technologies.

In their landmark 1998 book, Activists Beyond Borders, Kathryn Sikkink and Margaret Keck wrote that “by overcoming the deliberate suppression of information that sustains many abuses of power, human rights groups bring pressure to bear on those who perpetuate abuses” (Keck and Sikkink, 1998, Kindle Locations 77-78).  The Carr Center’s symposium on technology and human rights explored the ways modern human rights organization use science and technology to overcome the deliberate suppression of information.

Speakers discussed the latest advances in each of the key technologies represented at the symposium and used today by human rights organizations.

Steven Livingston and Sushma Raman co-organized the event. Livingston is Senior Fellow at the Carr Center and Professor of Media and Public Affairs and Professor of International Affairs at the George Washington University; Raman is the Executive Director of the Carr Center at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Full online version here.

 



Sarah Peck. 12/21/2016. Carr Center's 2016 Annual Report. Cambridge : Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. See full text.Abstract

See the Carr Center's 2016 Annual Report.

Today we stand at a precipice. A critical fight for fundamental human rights is brewing, and our work to find policy solutions to the most pressing human rights issues has never been more urgent. These issues include economic justice; human security; equality and discrimination; and institutions of global governance and civil society. We leverage research, practice, leadership and communications and technology to enhance global justice and to address all four of these priority issues.

2016 saw a number of important victories for the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, engaging our outstanding faculty members, fellows and students. We hosted a two-day symposium on the future of human rights and technology, convening a diverse group of practitioners working on these issues. And we organized a conference exploring the strategic costs and consequences of the use of torture.

2017 presents new challenges, but also new opportunities to engage and collaborate to ensure respect for our most fundamental rights and freedoms. We will continue to work tirelessly, as we have for the past 15 years, to enhance global justice – and we hope that you will join us in this critically important work.

Download our 2016 annual report to learn more. 



Alberto Mora. 2/5/2018. “How Trump Just Might Close Guantanamo Prison.” Defense One. See full text.Abstract

See Carr Center Senior Fellow Alberto Mora's new Op-Ed in Defense One.

The president asked SecDef and Congress to ensure that detention policies support warfighting aims. That should mean shutting Gitmo down.

Will President Trump close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay?  

This question may sound preposterous. After all, President Obama, who called the prison a threat to national security and American ideals, actually tried to close it. President Trump, by contrast, is on record as vehemently favoring not only its continuation but its expansion. On Jan. 30 he reaffirmed that commitment both in his State of the Union address and in an executive order revoking President Obama’s order commanding its closure. 

Why, then, even raise the prospect of closing Guantanamo during this administration? The answer lies in two related actions recently taken by the president: his command to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to “reexamine our military detention policy” and report back to him within 90 days and his request to Congress to ensure that “we continue to have all necessary power to detain terrorists.” The two actions in conjunction represent an unexpected open-mindedness on the part of the president with respect to detention policy. By seeking a broad-focus, “blank-sheet-of-paper” review, asking Mattis to take charge, and inviting Congress to join with them, President Trump acted prudently and, dare I say it, wisely. 

Full Op-Ed in Defense One.



Zachary D. Kaufman. 2/22/2018. “The Prospects, Problems, and Proliferation of Recent UN Investigations of International Law Violations.” Journal of International Criminal Justice, 16, 1, Pp. 93-112. See full text.Abstract

In his recent article, The Prospects, Problems and Proliferation of Recent UN Investigations of International Law Violations, Zachary Kaufman examines investigations into atrocity crimes in Iraq, Syria, Myanmar, Burundi, and Yemen. 

 

Atrocity crimes rage today in Iraq, Syria, Myanmar, Burundi, and Yemen. Given their potential to establish facts and promote accountability, recently opened United Nations investigations of international law violations in each of these states are thus a welcome, even if belated, development. However, these initiatives prompt questions about their designs, both in isolation and relative to each other.

This article describes the investigations into alleged violations in these five states, examines their respective sponsors and scopes, and presents a wide range of questions about the investigations and their implications, including their coordination with each other and their use of evidence in domestic, foreign, hybrid, and international courts (such as the International Criminal Court). The article concludes that, while seeking accountability for international law violations is certainly laudatory, these particular investigations raise significant questions about achieving that goal amidst rampant human rights abuses in these five states and beyond. International lawyers, atrocity crime survivors, and other observers thus await answers before assessing whether these investigations will truly promote justice. 

 



Siddharth Kara. 10/2017. Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective, Pp. 360. Colombia University Press. See full text.Abstract

Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective book by Siddharth Kara

 

Siddharth Kara is a tireless chronicler of the human cost of slavery around the world. He has documented the dark realities of modern slavery in order to reveal the degrading and dehumanizing systems that strip people of their dignity for the sake of profit—and to link the suffering of the enslaved to the day-to-day lives of consumers in the West. In Modern Slavery, Kara draws on his many years of expertise to demonstrate the astonishing scope of slavery and offer a concrete path toward its abolition.

From labor trafficking in the U.S. agricultural sector to sex trafficking in Nigeria to debt bondage in the Southeast Asian construction sector to forced labor in the Thai seafood industry, Kara depicts the myriad faces and forms of slavery, providing a comprehensive grounding in the realities of modern-day servitude. Drawing on sixteen years of field research in more than fifty countries around the globe—including revelatory interviews with both the enslaved and their oppressors—Kara sets out the key manifestations of modern slavery and how it is embedded in global supply chains. Slavery offers immense profits at minimal risk through the exploitation of vulnerable subclasses whose brutalization is tacitly accepted by the current global economic order. Kara has developed a business and economic analysis of slavery based on metrics and data that attest to the enormous scale and functioning of these systems of exploitation. Beyond this data-driven approach, Modern Slavery unflinchingly portrays the torments endured by the powerless. This searing exposé documents one of humanity’s greatest wrongs and lays out the framework for a comprehensive plan to eradicate it.



Sushma Raman and Steven Livingston. 5/15/2018. Human Rights Documentation in Limited Access Areas: The Use of Technology in War Crimes and Human Rights Abuse Investigations.. Carr Center Discussion Paper Series. 003rd ed. Cambridge: Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. See full text.Abstract

Human Rights Documentation in Limited Access Areas: The Use of Technology in War Crimes and Human Rights Abuse Investigations:

 

We offer a theoretical framework for understanding the role of technological capabilities (affordances) in documenting war crimes and human rights abuses in limited access areas.  We focus on three digital affordances: geospatial, digital network, and digital forensic science.  The paper argues that by leveraging digital affordances, human rights groups gain access to otherwise inaccessible areas, or to information that has been degraded in an effort to obfuscate culpability.  We also argue that the use of digital technology invites a reassessment of what we mean when we speak of a human rights organization.  Organizational morphology in digital space is hybrid in nature, with traditional organizations also taking on or joining more virtual or solely digital forms.



Sushma Raman and Mathias Risse. 5/30/2018. “Corruption and Human Rights: The Linkages, the Challenges and Paths for Progress Symposium Report.” In Corruption and Human Rights - The Linkages, the Challenges, and Paths for Progress. Cambridge, MA: Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. See full report. Abstract

Corruption and Human Rights: The Linkages, the Challenges and Paths for Progress Symposium Report 

This symposium was conceived as a way for us to convene leaders and academics from the human rights and anti-corruption movements, which have traditionally operated as separate communities of practice, to explore the linkages between the issues we work on and consider approaches to advance our work together. We hope that this symposium will not only help to inform and shape a deeper involvement of the Carr Center into the issue of corruption, but will also be the start of an ongoing collaboration between the human rights and anti-corruption communities.



Salil Shetty. 12/16/2018. “Can Technology deliver freedoms for India’s poor? ”. See full text.Abstract

Talk given by Carr Center's Senior Fellow Salil Shetty at TechFest IIT Bombay.

"My talk today is addressed to concerned citizens who are not experts on the subject. Many of the issues I am touching on require a much more complex and nuanced treatment but this talk is deliberately taking a simpler narrative."

Read Salil Shetty's complete presentation here: https://carrcenter.hks.harvard.edu/files/cchr/files/can_tech_salil_shetty_01.pdf

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