Cohort 1:
Rawia Aburabia (Law): "Personal status laws of Palestinian Bedouin women: Colonized by the law" (supervised by Michael Karayanni)
Nir Barak (Political Science): "The human right to the city and urban ecologism" (Avner de Shalit)
Tamar Hofnung (Political Science): "How broad, complex, and novel issues of human rights end up receiving very narrow policy treatment" (Avner de Shalit)
Lina Saba-Habesch (Law): "Criminal detentions of security suspects" (Mordechai Kremnitzer)
Limor Yehuda (Law): "The principle of collective equality in ethno-national conflict resolution" (Yuval Shany and Barak Medina)
Postdoctoral fellow: Dr. Noam Peleg, who received his PhD from University College London. His postdoctoral research looked at how the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child’s conceptions of ‘the child’ and childhood influence and shape the implementation of the Convention in various local contexts, with respect to children with diverse personal characteristics (ethnicity, religion, lass, gender, sexuality) and/or who come from different social, religion or economic backgrounds.
Introductory Seminar (November 16-26)
On November 16-27, 2014, the Minerva Center hosted an Introductory Seminar for the first cohort of 14 Fellows from Jerusalem and Berlin. The seminar provided the Fellows with an introduction to the new Program and to its interdisciplinary approach - as well as the opportunity to get to know one another, to introduce, discuss and develop their individual research projects, to meet with leading academics and practitioners, and to see first-hand and discuss in depth some of the human rights issues and dilemmas confronting Israel. Each of the Fellows presented their research before the rest of the group and their Hebrew University advisors. Led by HR-UP’s co-Directors Prof. Klaus Hoffmann-Holland of the Free University of Berlin and Prof. Tomer Broude of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the intensive introductory seminar also included lectures and comments by numerous Hebrew University faculty members, including Einat Albin (Law), Binyamin Blum (Law), Hillel Cohen (Middle East History), Avner De Shalit (Political science), Gili Drori (Head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology), David Enoch (Head of the Department of Philosophy), Ruth Gavison (Law), Amos Goldberg (Holocaust Studies), Arie Kacowicz (International Relations), Michael Karayanni (Law), Mordechai Kremnitzer (Law), Barak Medina (Law), and Yuval Shany (Dean of the Faculty of Law, and Member of the UN Human Rights Committee), as well as Andreas Zimmerman (Law) of the University of Potsdam. The lectures focused on diverse aspects of human rights, illuminating the interdisciplinary nature of HR-UP. The seminar included numerous thematic field trips. In Jerusalem the group visited Yad Vashem toured religious and historical sites, and participated in a tour focused on the “seam” between East and West Jerusalem with the NGO Ir Amim. In Tel-Aviv the group participated in a tour and discussion led by the NGO Hotline for Refugees and Migrants on migrants and asylum-seekers from Africa. In Nazareth the group met with Dr. Yousef Jabareen, Founding Director of Dirasat (The Arab Center for Law and Policy) - the Center’s Angel 2006-2007 Postdoctoral Fellow – on the status of the Arab minority in Israel, and with Adv. Abbass Abbass, Founding Director of Al-Manarah (The Association for Arab Persons with Disabilities) – a graduate of the Minerva Center’s Human Rights Fellows Program - to discuss the special challenges and barriers facing Arabs with disabilities. An overnight trip to the Negev desert in the South of Israel focused on issues of Bedouin rights, and included talks with the NGO’s Itach and Shatil. A key component of HR-UP is the biweekly research workshop, which hosts discussions of papers presented by guest speakers. Both the Jerusalem and Berlin students participate in the workshop, which is transmitted between the two campuses by videoconference.
Guest speakers at the HR-UP workshop in 2014-2015 included:
Prof. Yuval Shany, Hebrew University - General Comment No. 35 on Article 9 ICCPR, Liberty and Security of Person
Adv. Marlon Weichert, Member of the Brazilian Amnesty Commission - The Report of the Brazilian National Truth Commission
Prof. Tomer Broude, Hebrew University - The Financial Crises, Human Rights and Social Protest
Prof. Nigel Rodley, University of Essex and Chair of the Human Rights Committee – The Treaty Body Strengthening Process
Dr. Re'em Segev, Hebrew University - Making Sense of Discrimination
Prof. Brian Langille, University of Toronto - Human Rights and Labor Rights
Prof. Ruth Rubio-Marin, EUI - Parity, Independence and Women’s Democracy
Prof. Andreas Zimmerman, University of Potsdam - The ICJ Decision in Croatia v. Serbia (Genocide)
Prof. Samuel Moyn, Harvard University - Human Rights Compliance Wars
Prof. Donald Horowitz, Duke University - Approaches to Interethnic Conciliation in Severely Divided Societies
Prof. Mila Versteeg, University of Virginia - Quantitative Research on Human Rights
Summer school in Berlin (June 25 – July 5)
Our colleagues at FUB hosted the students and program faculty from both sides for the Program's annual Summer School in Berlin. In addition to student and guest presentations and site tours and discussions, the Summer School hosted the first meeting of the Program directors with the Program's International Advisory Board.
