Justice Matters Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

On today’s episode of Justice Matters, co-host Mathias Risse talks with Gay McDougall, distinguished scholar in residence at Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham University School of Law and member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Professor McDougall has worked for decades on the frontlines of race, gender, and economic exploitation in the American context and in countries around the world. In this episode she discusses the function of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, her early years growing up in Jim Crow-era Georgia, working with Nelson Mandela, the impact of George Floyd’s murder, the Biden Administration’s policies on race, and what’s at stake in the upcoming 2024 US Presidential election.

On today's episode of Justice Matters, co-host Kathryn Sikkink talks with Phuong Pham and Geoff Dancy about the Carr Center’s Transitional Justice Program, the culmination of the program’s research, and the creation of a research repository on the newly released Transitional Justice Evaluation Tools (TJET) website that compiles data on human rights prosecutions, truth commissions, and more around the world.

Phoung Pham is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a leading expert in the collection and evaluation of victim centered surveys in post-conflict societies. Geoff Dancy is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto who specializes in transitional justice and human rights accountability. Together they discuss the research of the Transitional Justice Program, along with numerous topics focused on evidence-based, victim-centered transitional justice and its implications for peace, democracy, and human rights around the world.

Visit the Transitional Justice Evaluation Tools website for comparative data on human rights prosecutions, amnesties, truth commissions, reparations, and vetting policies around the world from 1970 to 2020.

On today’s episode of Justice Matters, co-host Mathias Risse talks with Angela Riley, Chief Justice of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and Professor of Law and American Indian Studies at UCLA, about indigenous sovereignty and human rights in the United States. Together they discuss: the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, what sovereignty means for tribes in the US compared to indigenous communities globally, the tribal government’s relationship to the US federal and states governments, recent changes to the Citizen Potawatomi Nation’s constitution, the Potawatomi judiciary system, and Intellectual Property law in the US and its relation to indigenous knowledge.

On today’s episode of Justice Matters, co-host Maggie Gates is joined by Bevin Croft and Ebony Flint from the Human Services Research Institute for a conversation about the intersections of mental health and human rights in the wake of new guidance on mental health issued in October 2023 by the World Health Organization and the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights. They discuss the guidance and the Human Services Research Institute, a rights based approach to mental health system, peer to peer support, the importance of centering those with lived experience, and person-centered care.

On today’s episode of Justice Matters, co-host Mathias Risse talks with Claire Charters who was recently named in the role of Rongomau Taketake to lead work on the Te Kāhui Tika Tangata Human Rights Commission in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Charters is a Professor at the University of Auckland Faculty of Law specializing in indigenous peoples’ rights in international and constitutional law. Together they discuss her new position on the commission, the status of Māori representation in government, the right wing pushback against indigenous rights, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi and its implications for Māori sovereignty, and the importance of the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

On today’s episode of Justice Matters, co-host Maggie Gates talks with Karla Torres and Catalina Martinez Coral from the Center for Reproductive Rights. On November 8, 2023, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) held a landmark hearing on the human rights violations caused by the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the move to ban abortion in the United States.

The IACHR is a principle and autonomous body of the organization of American States that monitors human rights across the Americas. The hearing was requested by the Center for Reproductive Rights and 13 other US organizations focused on reproductive health rights and justice, disability rights, and human rights. In this conversation, Torres and Coral discuss the hearing, abortion as an essential human right, the Dobbs decision in the U.S., the feminist-led Legal and Social decriminalization of abortion in Latin America and its impact on the world, and the future of abortion rights in the U.S.

Karla Torres has been senior human rights counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights since 2017. She works within the U.S. Human Rights Team and collaborates with staff across various departments, including the U.S. Policy and Advocacy and U.S. Litigation teams, as well as the Center's Global Legal Program. Torres most recently served as a program officer at Equality Now, where she worked in close partnership with grassroots organizations in the Americas to expose human rights violations against women and girls and to promote legal frameworks that would protect against these violations.

Catalina Martinez Corral is a feminist from Cali, Colombia. She's currently the vice president for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Center for Reproductive Rights. She is a member of the Causa Justa Movement and one of the plaintiffs in the historic ruling that partially decriminalized abortion in Colombia.