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Bard Human Rights Program

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Bard College Announces Two Recipients of the Second Annual Anthony Lester Fellowships to Support Practical Work in the Field of Human Rights and the Rule of Law

Hadeal Abdelatti will use the fellowship to investigate concerns around the handling of deceased inmates’ organs in the state of Alabama. James Rooney will use the fellowship to provide legal advice and assistance to the Streha Centre, an LGBTI+ shelter and community service in Albania, for three months in summer 2025. Each fellow will receive a stipend of $25,000.

Bard College Announces Two Recipients of the Second Annual Anthony Lester Fellowships to Support Practical Work in the Field of Human Rights and the Rule of Law

The Human Rights Project at Bard College has announced this year’s recipients of the Anthony Lester Fellowships, which support practical work in human rights and the rule of law. Fellowships have been awarded to Hadeal Abdelatti and James Rooney. Abdelatti (a Cambridge law finalist and aspiring barrister) will use the fellowship to investigate concerns around the handling of deceased inmates’ organs in the state of Alabama. James Rooney (a barrister-at-law specializing in public interest and human rights law from Ireland) will use the fellowship to provide legal advice and assistance to the Streha Centre, an LGBTI+ shelter and community service in Albania, for three months in summer 2025. Each fellow will receive a stipend of $25,000.

The fellowship committee selected Abdelatti and Rooney from a large number of applications because their projects exemplified Anthony Lester’s commitment to the practical use of the rule of law and human rights as a tool to do good in the world.

Thomas Keenan, director of the Human Rights Project at Bard, said: “From Alabama to Albania, these two creative young advocates will pursue projects of critical, and painfully symptomatic, urgency. Hadeal Abdelatti and James Rooney are showing us that the front lines of human rights work today are dynamic and complex. In the spirit of Anthony Lester, they know what's worth fighting for.”

Hadeal Abdelatti is an experienced researcher and final-year law student at the University of Cambridge. Abdelatti spent two years working as a student researcher for a university-wide project investigating the systemic legacies of colonialism in Cambridge’s teaching and learning. In 2024, Abdelatti won a SEDA Award in recognition of her work on this project.
 
In the summer of 2024, Abdelatti undertook an internship with The Woods Foundation in Alabama. During this time, she learned how gaps in state legislation are leaving room for unethical practices, particularly around the retention and appropriation of deceased prisoners’ organs without clear consent or adequate communication with their families.
 
Abdelatti’s project for the Lester Fellowship aims to address concerns around the handling of deceased prisoners’ organs. Through a combination of mapping, legal research, litigation, and community engagement, Abdelatti aims to pinpoint gaps in oversight, inform legal and policy reform, and raise awareness to help strengthen community responses to potential rights violations.

James Rooney is a barrister-at-law in Ireland. His practice specializes in public interest and human rights law, regularly representing asylum seekers, people experiencing housing precarity, and parents whose children have been taken into care by the state. He cofounded a weekly clinic at the Free Legal Advice Centres in Dublin, focused on addressing the unmet legal needs of the LGBTI+ community in Ireland. The work he proposes to do with the Lester Fellowship derives from his passion for practical human rights work and a motivation to put his extensive legal education to good use in the service of others and will focus on the Streha Centre in Tirana, Albania.

Rooney’s Lester Fellowship project will provide legal advice and assistance for three months in summer 2025 to the Streha Centre, an LGBTI+ shelter and community service in Albania. Established in 2014, Streha is the first LGBTI+ residential shelter in Southeast Europe. Streha provides emergency accommodation, legal advice, and social supports for LGBTI+ clients experiencing discrimination and social exclusion in Albania and throughout the wider region. Streha fields daily requests for urgent legal advice from LGBTI+ people, including on how to seek international protection in the European Union due to persecution, including death threats, torture, and discrimination, on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Rooney will use his expertise as an immigration lawyer and LGBTI+ rights advocate in a country receiving international protection applications from Albanian nationals, to provide assistance in advance of their seeking asylum. Rooney’s project is a timely and worthwhile focus as the possible withdrawal of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funding in the coming year could jeopardise one of the few sanctuaries for vulnerable and marginalized sexual minorities in Southeast Europe.

Anthony Lester Fellowships
The fellowships honor the memory and legacy of Anthony Lester QC (Lord Lester of Herne Hill), one of Britain’s most distinguished human rights lawyers. As a young lawyer, Lester visited the American South twice during the civil rights movement and wrote a report on race relations. His experiences there inspired his pioneering work as a barrister and legislator. He wrote in his memoir Talking to Myself that, while on a fellowship in the United States, he realized “the practice of law could be used to promote political and social change . . . Reinforced by my involvement with American constitutional law and civil rights in the Deep South, I decided to give it a try. It was life-changing.”

The fellowships are administered by the Human Rights Project at Bard College, and supported by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, and the Lester family.  Maya Lester KC, Anthony Lester’s daughter and a British barrister, said: “We are delighted to be able to offer these fellowships in memory of our father who was inspired by his early international experience and an enthusiastic mentor to lawyers early in their careers wanting to do something useful for the world.” Gideon Lester, Anthony Lester’s son and Chief Executive and Artistic Director of the Fisher Center at Bard, added: “We are grateful to the Gatsby and Open Society Foundations for their leadership support, which ensures that these fellowships exist in perpetuity, and to Bard College’s Human Rights Project for administering them.”

Post Date: 06-24-2025

Sonita Alizadeh ’23 Named 2025 Cannes LionHeart

Sonita Alizadeh ’23, Bard College alumna and human rights activist, has been announced as the 2025 Cannes LionHeart by the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The honor is awarded to a recipient who harnesses their position to make a positive difference to the world, and Alizadeh has used her platforms as the first professional Afghan rapper, an activist, and an author to fight child marriage and gender injustice and be a global voice for women’s rights.

Sonita Alizadeh ’23 Named 2025 Cannes LionHeart

Sonita Alizadeh ’23, Bard College alumna and human rights activist, has been announced as the 2025 Cannes LionHeart by the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The honor is awarded to a recipient who harnesses their position to make a positive difference to the world, and Alizadeh has used her platforms as the first professional Afghan rapper, an activist, and an author to fight child marriage and gender injustice and be a global voice for women’s rights. “Sonita’s journey is an inspirational story of resilience and courage,” said Philip Thomas, chair of Cannes Lions. “Through her music and her activism, she has used her voice and her platform to challenge oppression and inspire the next generation.” 

Born under Taliban rule, Alizadeh faced the threat of child marriage twice, at ages 10 and 16, before finding her voice through music. She has since performed on global stages and collaborated with artists and organisations that share her mission, and has addressed world leaders and worked with NGOs such as the UN, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International to push for change. “Being awarded the Cannes LionHeart is more than an honor—it’s a powerful affirmation that using my voice to fight for girls' rights and freedom matters,” said Alizadeh. “This award reflects the journey from silence to sound, from being sold to standing on the world stage. It reminds me that no dream is too wild when it’s rooted in truth, courage, and purpose.”
Learn More About Sonita Alizadeh

Post Date: 05-06-2025

Omar G. Encarnación Reflects on the Legacy of the First Latin American Pope

For Time magazine, Omar G. Encarnación, Charles Flint Kellogg Professor of Politics at Bard, considers the legacy of Pope Francis after his passing on Easter Monday. Although Francis did not reverse the decline of Catholicism in Latin America, as the Vatican had hoped, he did transform the Church in the image of Latin America, writes Encarnación.

Omar G. Encarnación Reflects on the Legacy of the First Latin American Pope

For Time magazine, Omar G. Encarnación, Charles Flint Kellogg Professor of Politics at Bard, considers the legacy of Pope Francis after his passing on Easter Monday. Although Francis did not reverse the decline of Catholicism in Latin America, as the Vatican had hoped, he did transform the Church in the image of Latin America, writes Encarnación. In his first papal announcement, Francis denounced the twin evils of poverty and inequality, citing “idolatry of money” and criticizing “unfettered capitalism as a new tyranny,” ideas drawn from Liberation Theology, a progressive philosophy originating in Latin America that married Marxist critiques of capitalism with traditional Catholic concerns for the poor and marginalized. The Argentine pontiff’s second legacy, informed by an understanding of the devastating impacts of Amazonian deforestation especially on vulnerable populations, was that he “unambiguously aligned the Vatican with the fight against climate change.” Pope Francis’s third and most surprising legacy, asserts Encarnación, was his support of the LGBTQ community’s struggle for dignity and respect, a perspective shaped by the divisive culture war over same-sex marriage in Argentina, the first country in Latin America to legalize gay marriage in July 2010. “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” the Pope once said when asked about homosexuals in the Catholic clergy. Encarnación writes, “he made the Church more progressive at a time when the far-right is ascendant around the globe. Whether that direction continues will be up to the next Pontiff. But one thing is certain: Francis will be a tough act to follow.”
Read in Time

Post Date: 04-23-2025

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2023

Tuesday, November 28, 2023
  Hegeman 204A  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Hamas’ attack on October 7 and Israel’s invasion of Gaza have had a profound impact on Israel, Palestine, and far beyond. How might we consider these events in the context of the history of Zionism, of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and of antisemitism?  

We hope that an important part of the discussion will be questions from those attending about current events and the long, complex evolution that produced them. We will respond as best we can from our various perspectives.

Cecile E. Kuznitz, Patricia Ross Weis '52 Chair in Jewish History and Culture
Joel Perlmann, Professor, Bard College and Senior Scholar, Levy Institute
Shai Secunda, Jacob Neusner Professor of Judaism, moderator


Wednesday, November 15, 2023
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The Human Rights Project invites the Bard community to an open Q&A event on the war on Gaza, its broader context, and its reverberations in the United States.

Please join us on Wednesday, November 15 at 4:00 pm in RKC 103.

When we say Q&A, we mean it. The event will be centered around multiple rounds of questions from the audience, which can be asked out loud or submitted anonymously via note cards that will be distributed during the event.

The three faculty panelists Ziad Abu-Rish (Human Rights and Middle East Studies), Miriam Felton-Dansky (Theater and Performance), and Mie Inouye (Politics) will also reflect briefly on how they came to hold the views they do and the challenges of staking out an explicit stance.


Wednesday, November 8, 2023
  Naiima Khahaifa, Guarini Fellow
Departments of Geography and 
African and African-American Studies
Dartmouth College 

Olin 102  5:15 pm EST/GMT-5
Mass incarceration, characterized by unprecedented prison population growth in the US and a disproportionately large representation of Black men, has garnered much scholarly attention; however, a parallel increase in the proportion of Black correctional officers (COs) has not yet received the same consideration. During the early 1970s, demands made by the Prisoners’ Rights Movement led to the recruitment of thousands of Black men and women into the US correctional workforce over the following decades. Thus, focusing on New York State, I argue that as correctional workforce integration redefined the state’s prison system and broader carceral geography, the racialized process of mass incarceration came to depend on the labor of Black COs. Based on a qualitative analysis of life/occupational history interviews with Black COs in Buffalo, NY, recruited between the late 1970s and early 1990s, I find that dynamics of race, class, and gender shape relationships between Black COs and incarcerated individuals as their day-to-day encounters cultivated cooperation and consent in an otherwise volatile prison environment. Deriving from notions of community policing and fictive kinship, I developed the concept of carceral kinship, which refers to the formation of familial-like bonds that appeared the strongest between Black women COs and Black incarcerated men. This concept matters because it reveals the intricate dynamics and micro-politics of prison spaces and how carceral geographies rely on intimate, empathetic, and emotional care work that is profoundly raced and gendered.  


Thursday, November 2, 2023
Reem-Kayden Center Room 103  4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join us for a talk by Mariana Katzarova, the first-ever appointed UN special rapporteur on human rights in Russia. Her talk will focus on the deteriorating human rights conditions in the country and the challenges to her fact-finding mission.

We are privileged to have Mariana Katzarova join us on campus, directly from presenting the results of her fact-finding mission at the United Nations. She is the first person to hold the position of special rapporteur on human rights in Russia, an appointment that is the latest chapter in a remarkable career in human rights advocacy, as the biography below details. This is a rare opportunity to hear firsthand from one of the world's leading authorities on human rights in Russia.

Mariana Katzarova was appointed as special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Russian Federation by the UN Human Rights Council on 4 April 2023. She officially assumed her function on 1 May 2023. Ms. Katzarova led the UN Human Rights Council mandated examination of the human rights situation in Belarus, in 2021-22. During the first 2 years of the armed conflict in Ukraine (in 2014-16), she led the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission team in Donbas as head of the regional office in Eastern Ukraine. For a decade she headed the Amnesty International investigations of human rights in Russia and the two Chechnya conflicts. With the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, she focused on the war in Bosnia and the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Ms. Katzarova founded RAW in WAR (Reach All Women in War) in 2006 after working as a journalist and human rights investigator in the war zones of Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya. At RAW, she established the annual Anna Politkovskaya Award for women human rights defenders working in war and conflict zones. She was Advisor to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on combating human trafficking, and a senior advisor at the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe).
 


Thursday, October 26, 2023
Bard Center for the Study of Hate Program
Olin Humanities, Room 205  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
A discussion with Christopher McIntosh, assistant professor of political science, and Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, moderated by Rabbi Joshua Boettiger, Jewish chaplain and visiting assistant professor of the humanities.


Tuesday, October 24, 2023
  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:15 pm – 6:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
We are very happy to welcome Nathan Thrall to Bard for a conversation between him and Abed Salama, the protagonist of Thrall's book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (Metropolitan Books). This event is sponsored by the Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies Programs. You can read and listen to an excerpt from the book here.

In his book, the struggle over Israel-Palestine is rendered at the human scale through the terrible story of a school bus accident that killed Abed’s five-year-old son Milad. Placing the personal narrative in the context of structural forces, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama elucidates the daily injustices faced by the roughly 3.2 million Palestinians living in the West Bank. Richly reported and deeply researched, the book cuts through the abstractions of 'the conflict' and 'the occupation' with a visceral and bracing account of an apparently exceptional event that reveals the painful realities of everyday life for Palestinians.

We have been planning this event for months, but it now takes on special relevance given the unfolding events in the Gaza Strip. As a recent review in the Guardian put it, "it feels hard to recommend reading material against such a backdrop, but a book such as A Day in the Life of Abed Salama brims over with just the sort of compassion and understanding that is needed at a time like this. ... Thrall looks at the Israel/Palestine conflict with unflinching clarity and quiet anger, but above all, with nuance. At a time when facts have become weapons in this seemingly endless conflict, this is a book that speaks with deep and authentic truth of ordinary lives trapped in the jaws of history."

Copies of the book will be available for purchase.

Nathan Thrall is the author of The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine (Metropolitan, 2017), and has written extensively on the region in the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project. He lives in Jerusalem.

Abed Salama is a Palestinian living under Israeli rule in the enclave of Anata in greater Jerusalem. Salama’s story of losing his five-year-old son Milad in a harrowing school bus accident provides the framework for Thrall’s depiction of Israel/Palestine.


Tuesday, September 26, 2023
  Guest lecturers Kareem Abdulrahman and Bachtyar Ali
Hegeman 201  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Politics has at least two faces in the works of Iraqi Kurdish novelist Bachtyar Ali. While his characters are in a constant search to prove their humanity, politics often appears as a barrier in that search. In The Last Pomegranate Tree, for example, a meditation on fatherhood is intertwined with the discovery of increasing corruption in political leadership. Why does salvation seem to fall beyond politics? Given the recent history of Iraqi Kurdistan, what is the significance of politics in literature? Yet another face is the politics of literature: Kurdish language has lived on the margins of the more dominant languages in the Middle East for centuries. In this context, literary translation could be seen as an effort to put the Kurds, the largest minority group without their own nation state, on the cultural map of the world. Here the expression that the translator is a “traitor” may ring hollow when the translator appears first of all as an activist with loyalties. What then are the politics of translating Kurdish literature in the contemporary world? This event invites conversation and reflection with a novelist and his translator.


Tuesday, April 4, 2023
with speakers June Nemon and leaders from the Stony Run Tenants Union
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:10 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This event is part of the Political Organizing Speaker Series, Spring 2023


Thursday, March 16, 2023
with speakers Becky Simonsen and Puya Gerami
Olin Humanities, Room 203  5:10 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
More information on the work of these speakers can be found here.

This event is part of the Political Organizing Speaker Series, Spring 2023


Wednesday, February 22, 2023
Professor J.T. Roane, assistant professor of geography at Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk is drawn from Roane's recently published book, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU Press, 2023). Roane shows how working-class Black communities cultivated insurgent assembly—dark agoras—in twentieth century Philadelphia. He investigates the ways they transposed rural imaginaries about and practices of place as part of their spatial resistances and efforts to contour industrial neighborhoods. In acts that ranged from the mundane refashioning of intimate spaces to confrontations over the city's social and ecological arrangement, Black communities challenged the imposition of Progressive visions for urban order seeking to enclose or displace them.