Tag Archives: human rights

Upcoming Event: Looking at the World Through the Lens of Torture

From our friends in Interpretation Theory:

Looking at the World Through the Lens of Torture

photo of Lisa Hajjar Monday, February 17, 2014

4:30 p.m.

Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall

Lisa Hajjar

Professor of Sociology

University of California, Santa Barbara

Lisa Hajjar will address the significance of torture (and anti-torture) to understand historical developments in the relationship among law, state, and society. To illustrate, she will discuss the development of clandestine politics of American torture in the 20th century, and the ramifications of officially-sanctioned torture in the 21st century in the context of the “war on terror.” She will also highlight various forms of anti-torture work in the realms of law, media and popular culture.

Hajjar’s areas of expertise include sociology of law, law and society, international and global studies, and political sociology. Her research interests include human rights, international law, torture, war and

conflict. Her first book, Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (University of California Press, 2005) is a sociological study of law and conflict in Israel/Palestine. She is

currently working on a book about anti-torture lawyering in the U.S. in post-9/11.

Sponsored by Interpretation Theory and Islamic Studies Programs, the French Section of Modern Languages, and Department of History

Human rights in the Occupied Territories

Students for Peace and Justice in Palestine will host Sunjeev Bery on campus Tuesday, October 22 at 4:30 in Kohlberg 116.

Sunjeev BeryBery will talk about Israel’s violations of human rights in the Occupied Territories including the Gaza student blockade, Nabi Saleh village, and other human rights issues.

Sunjeev Bery is the Advocacy Director for the Middle East and North Africa for Amnesty International USA. AmnestyInternational is a Nobel Peace Prize winning human rights organization with over 3 million members. Sunjeev Bery has attended the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, has worked at the ACLU, and frequently writes articles on human rights issues.

The event is sponsored by Political Science, Islamic Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Forum for Free Speech, and the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.

How death penalty defense lawyers cope with stress and trauma

Fighting for Their Lives — A Talk by Susannah Sheffer ‘86

Friday, Sept. 27, 2013, 3:00 – 4:30 p.m.

Lang Center, Keith Room, Swarthmore College

Download a flyer.

Directions to Swarthmore College

How do attorneys who represent clients facing the death penalty cope with the stress and trauma of their work? What is it like to work so hard and lose so often?

Through conversations with twenty of the most experienced and dedicated post-conviction capital defenders in the United States, Susannah Sheffer explores this emotional territory for the first time in her new book, “Fighting for Their Lives: Inside the Experiences of Capital Defense Attorneys.”

From these capital defenders we can learn not only about the deep and long-term effects of the death penalty but also about broader human questions of hope, effectiveness, success, failure, strength, fragility, and perseverance.

“I am grateful to Susannah Sheffer for bringing these stories to light.” – Sister Helen Prejean, author of “Dead Man Walking.”

Susannah Sheffer (Swarthmore ’86) is Project Director and Staff Writer at Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, a non-profit organization of families of murder victims and families of people who have been executed. In addition to “Fighting for Their Lives” (Vanderbilt University Press), her poetry collection “This Kind of Knowing” was also published this year by Cooper Dillon Books.

Sponsored by Lang Center for Social & Policy Studies, Philosophy Department, Religion Department, and Pre-Law Advising Office.

Mark your calendars: Alice Paul ’05, Mabel Vernon ’06, and the Battle for the Ballot

Mark your calendars for the College’s first sesquicentennial celebration event, a talk by author Mary Walton:

A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul ’05, Mabel Vernon ’06, and the Battle for the Ballot

Mary Walton

September 19, 2013; 4:15 p.m.

Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall, Swarthmore College

Maps and directions

Download a flyer

Mary Walton

On September 19th, Peace and Conflict Studies and co-sponsors will celebrate the International Day of Peace, 125 years of peace and conflict studies at Swarthmore College, and the start of the College’s Sesquicentennial with a talk by Mary Walton, author of A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot. The focus of Walton’s talk will be Alice Paul (Class of 1905) and her friend and fellow Swarthmore alum, Mabel Vernon (Class of 1906).

A New Jersey Quaker, Alice Paul was the leader of the militant wing of the suffrage movement from 1913 to 1920. Hers was a David-and-Goliath struggle to convince a reluctant congress and a stubborn president to give women the vote. Paul and her followers were the first people to picket the White House. They were arrested, thrown in jail, brutalized and force fed when they went on hunger strikes. A pioneer in non-violent resistance, she was to suffrage what Gandhi was to Indian independence, what Martin Luther King Jr. was to civil rights.

In 1913, Mabel Vernon gladly gave up teaching to join her college friend, Alice Paul, in working full time for the Congressional Union. From that day on, she devoted her life to suffrage and other causes. Mabel Vernon was among the most militant suffragists. In 1916, she stood up in a full auditorium and heckled President Wilson as he spoke about democracy. Vernon picketed the White House and was among the first suffragists to go to jail.

Mary Walton is the author of four previous works of nonfiction. She was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer for many years where she wrote more than a hundred magazine stories as a staff writer for the Sunday Inquirer Magazine. She has also written for the New York Times, Washingtonian, theWashington Monthly, and the American Journalism Review. After graduation from Harvard University, and a turn at social work and community organizing, Walton began her journalism career in 1969 as a reporter for the Charleston (WV) Gazette.

International Day of Peace 2013

Sponsors: Peace and Conflict Studies, the President’s Office, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Friends Historical Library, History Department, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Women’s Resource Center, Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, English Literature Department, and Political Science Department.

Bibliographic links for photographs.

Roth ’84 Lecture on Human Rights and International Law

The presentation by Prof. Brad Roth ’84 that was postponed last semester is back on!

COMING TO TERMS WITH RUTHLESSNESS: Human Rights Violations, Moral Outrage, and the Role of International Law

Brad Roth ‘84

Professor of Law, Wayne State University

Thursday April 18, 2013

4:30 PM

Bond Memorial Hall

Maps and directions

The norm of non-intervention is often ignored when the U.S. and other world powers claim that respect for Sovereignty should not be a shield to protect governments that are massacring their people. But there is a danger when the norm of non-intervention that has undergirded international law is put aside: an erosion of this norm licenses the strong to pursue justice as they unilaterally understand it. An over-emphasis on international criminal justice similarly undermines the nonintervention presumption. A potential result is a “ruthlessness to end all ruthlessness,” with moralistic outrage against wrongdoers being invoked to rationalize the infliction of what can turn out to be even greater human costs.

Professor Brad Roth, Swarthmore Class of 1984, teaches political theory and international law at Wayne State University. His recent book, Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement (Oxford University Press, 2011), applies principles of political morality to the relationship between international and domestic legal authority.

Sponsored by Departments of Political Science, Peace and Conflict Studies, and History

Dr. Jonathan Kuttab on Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

“Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”

Dr. Jonathan Kuttab

Thursday, November 1, 2012

4:30 p.m.

Science Center 101

Swarthmore College

Students for Peace and Justice in Palestine are hosting Dr. Jonathan Kuttab, a leading human rights lawyer in Israel and Palestine, who co-founded the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, Al-Haq, and the Mandela Institute for Political Prisoners. He also co-founded the Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems. He is the Chairman of the Board of Bethlehem Bible College and of Holy Land Trust.

The lecture will discuss the use of law as an instrument of policy by Israel to continue the occupation, whether the situation in Israel/Palestine defines a state of apartheid, and how international law and the International Criminal Court (ICC) can be used to find a just resolution.

Sponsored by Students for Peace and Justice in Palestine and the Forum for Free Speech

POSTPONED Roth ’84 Lecture on Human Rights and International Law

[This event has been postponed. Stay tuned to this blog for updates.]

COMING TO TERMS WITH RUTHLESSNESS: Human Rights Violations, Moral Outrage, and the Role of International Law

Brad Roth ‘84

Professor of Law, Wayne State University

Monday, October 29, 2012

4:30 PM

Trotter 301

Sponsored by Departments of Political Science, Peace and Conflict Studies, and History

Prof. Krista Thomason on human rights and service learning

Prof. Krista Thomason will be giving a talk entitled “Philosophy and Human Rights: Scholarship and Activism” at the Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in March 2013. The talk uses PHIL 051 Human Rights and Atrocity as a model for incorporating service learning into philosophy courses. It will feature examples of some of the final projects her students designed in Spring 2012. The talk also examines the ways in which scholarship can inform activism as well as the ways in which scholarship can be a form of activism.

Ian Kysel ’04 on Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union

Ian Kysel ’04 will speak on Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union

Tuesday, March 27, 2012; 5:30pm in Science Center room 183 at Swarthmore College

Ian Kysel is the Aryeh Neier Fellow with Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union where he focuses on the solitary confinement of youth held in jails and prisons in the United States. He is also a volunteer with the International Migrants Bill of Rights (IMBR) Initiative, of which he was formerly a co-coordinator. While a law student at Georgetown, Ian worked with the Georgetown Center for Applied Legal Studies, the United States Department of State Office of the Legal Adviser, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Amnesty International USA and Shearman & Sterling, LLP.

Prior to law school, Ian worked with non-citizens seeking asylum in the United States at Bromberg, Kohler Maya & Maschler, PLLC and lived in both Moscow and Algiers. Ian received a B.A. with high honors, Phi Beta Kappa, from Swarthmore College in 2004, where he was a member of Sixteen Feet and helped create a pilot Outdoor Orientation Program with Swarthmore, Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges, and received a J.D., magna cum laude, with a Certificate in Refugees & Humanitarian Emergencies from Georgetown University Law Center in 2011, where he was a Global Law Scholar, recipient of the Bettina E. Pruckmayr Memorial Award and an Articles Editor of the Georgetown Journal of International Law.

Sponsor: Career Services

Nuremberg film screening

NUREMBERG: ITS LESSON FOR TODAY (1948)

The Schulberg/Waletzky Restoration

Writer-director Stuart Schulberg, left, pictured at his film’s 1948 premiere in Stuttgart, Germany, with John Scott. (Courtesy photo)

One Screening Only!

Monday, December 5, 2011

7:00 pm

Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema

(maps and directions)

Special guest Sandra Schulberg (’71) – daughter of filmmaker Stuart Schulberg & producer of the restoration – will speak about the making of Nuremberg and its subsequent suppression in the U.S.

Visit www.nurembergfilm.org and Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today on Facebook

Co-sponsored by Peace and Conflict Studies and German Studies. Event made possible by the Serendipity Fund.

Sandra Schulberg '71 and Sam Hirshman '13 talk after the screening of the film in LPAC Cinema.