We, the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, are about to launch our alumni e- forum, and I must say I am really impressed by this community site! In my mind, a place to “meet” is crusial for creating and, foremost, maintaing communication between practioners and theorists. We have been neglecting to make use of the many former students in our activities and trainings/ courses, and I believe, and hope, that the forum could change that. Now, a way of creating a tool for incorporating practical experiences in the curriculas in higher educations could be to “recycle” the knowledge gained by the students, who hopefully would have hands on experience of using their theoretical knowledge. But still, this is not a way to actually creating practical experiences for students, but rather of building on the experience of past students. I am curious to know if anyone has ideas on how to best make use of alumni in trainings and academic programmes?

Mikael Ohlsson

Programme Associate

Raoul Wallenberg Institute

Sweden

Students, and alumni, are the human rights activists of the future. And not just those students who take courses that specifically focus on human rights. Human rights are cross/multi discplinary. The course I teach at the University of Minnesota is the capstone course in the undergraduate leadership minor - leadership for global citizenship. The U of M, as many other academic institutions, is investing heavily in the concept that students should spend time studying abroad and that all courses should be taught in the context of a global mindset. The undergraduates on the leadership minor come from across campus, business school, liberal arts, medecine..........and they come to the leadership minor with the specific hope that they can have some exposure to real world experiences. The framework for the minor is social change and the students use a public achievement framework for their work. They work with local high school students on projects such as making their campus more green, installing a public crossing outside the school. They learn how to mentor, lead and advocate. With the advent of a 'community organizer" to the White House, they are excited and engaged at the possibility of "being the change we want to see".

When they reach the global citizenship semester, they are fired up and ready to apply their skills but then frustrated at their inability to implement hands on projects. This is where technology is increasingly coming to the rescue. Enter New Tactics! The NT database has proved a wonderful resource for the students' country leadership development projects. Here they can get a feel for practical, grass roots tactics that have impacted human rights around the world. For instance, the business students can relate to the importance of micro enterprise to impoverished communities that are currently subject to such abuses as child labor and human trafficking and through that prism, address the question of corporate social responsiblity. The NT tactical map affords them a way to help start designing their projects by identifying the relationships at the heart of a problem and mapping their own way to work with others involved locally, nationally and gobally.

Soliya:  http://www.soliya.net/ is another innovative project that was started by a former journalist and conflict resolution expert. It is a moderated dialogue that puts western students in touch with students from the Muslim world to discuss cultural and political issues and work together on putting together videos that document human rights abuses from varying perspectives.  The Girls International Forum: www.gif.org in Minneapolis is a project that works with young girls in developing countries and here in Minnesota to put them in touch with each other to share the issues that concern them and to train them to advocate for their own rights on issues that they identify such as education, economic access and health.

My own background is that of a practitioner turned educator. I used to think that I had done it the 'wrong' way round by doing the practice first and then the theory. But increasingly we are coming to see on the leadership minor that practice (and failure) are the entry points to fire up the students enthusiasm. Once they have carried out some hands on projects and seen the challenges, they are ready to analyze and debrief and discuss lessons learned. So for instance, a reading about the policy change cycle was introduced after their country leadership project and the students were immediately engaged as they realized their projects were an EXAMPLE of  policy change. Previously we had done this same reading before the project and it had very little resonance.

There should not be a disconnect between the classroom and the real world, we do not have time for that. So encourage other human rights activists that you know to become educators and bring that real life experience into the classroom.

I would appreciate any and all ideas of other resources that can help simulate or bring practical experience into the classroom and look forward to the rest of this fascinating dialogue.

Amy Weismann, Deputy Director, University of Iowa Center for Human Rights

For those of us in rural communities and small towns, outside large metropollitan areas where NGOS and service providers engage human rights as a framework for their activities, connecting students to "real life experience" in the human rights field, especially to a diverse array of approaches to human rights work, is sometimes a challenge. We all share the insight that teaching about the practice of human rights requires imaginative, cost-effective strategies as well as a network of support. I've found that vidoeconferencing provides an immediacy of experience that is quite impactful, and that it helps build a network of support for teaching about human rights without the need for practitioners to undertake expensive, time consuming (and carbon emission producing!) travel to reach your students. I've had great recent experiences utilizing videoconferencing technologies to bring practitioners from around the world into my undergraduate classroom in Iowa City. From the feedback my students have provided, I believe it has opened opportuntiies for bridging the theory-practice divide. I'll share the nuts and botls with you here.

I've experimented with the use of vidoeconferencing using two systems supported by the University of Iowa. One system requires site-to-site transmission and allows for very high quality, real time video and audio interaction between a class of students and the practitioner, both of whom , however, must be situated in respective rooms at each location equipped with cameras and microphones. The system is internet-based and is called "H.323/IP". Here is the support website for the H.323/IP program at the University of Iowa: http://at.its.uiowa.edu/digimedia/collabtools/collaborationenvironments.shtml>.

Although not yet universally available, many colleges and Universities with this technology are interested in encourgaing its use as a teaching tool and make it available to faculty and staff for use in classroom teaching, with tech support to boot! And in many cases, the viodeconferecne can be recorded for student review and use in teaching at a later date.

Another resource, one that has the potential for much wider usage, is Ellminate Live!. it is particularly well suited for human rights related classrooms because it can be accessed and used by anyone with a computer, including practitioners in living in communities around the world without access to high speed internet. It provides mutliple channels to run at a time so that practitioners can present together from different locations, allows for powerpoint and video to run simulataneously with the live presentations, has a live chat option so that students can pose questions to the practitioner or if multiple practitioners are on line with the class at once, can pose them to one another for the class to see.

Elluminate Live's training and support web pages: http://www.elluminate.com/support/training/

University of Iowa's Elluminate Live service: http://globalcampus.uiowa.edu

In some cases, the convenience of a videoconference, especially from a home or office computer terminal, has allowed practitioners whose time constraints would have prevented them from attending a class to share their expertise nonetheless from the convenience of their home or office.

Through these two systems, I've been able to connect my class with practitioners from Berkeley, California to Chicago, Illinois, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, to The Hague, The Netherlands.

If your school does not support these or other viodeconferecning systems for teaching use, you may wish to ask why, and request that your technology services unit invest in supporting a system. It has the potential to bring the world to your students!

Mingzhen Ge, Shandong University, Human Rights Center, Law School, China

There are really many kind of resources which I can find in China. But the class hours are limited, so how to select the proper resources is more important. In Shandong University, there have at least three human rights education courses which I teach and participate all. There have two human rights education courses in Law School, one is for undergraduate students, and another is for graduate students. The third human rights courses is for students who are from other departments. These three courses have different motives. Students in different courses also have different knowledge background and have different needs in human rights education.

Another importand thing is that, till now, most of the resoures which is proper to choose for some specific topics human rights teaching are in English, so sometimes it is a bit difficult for students to use such resources.

Mingzhen Ge, Shandong University, Human Rights Center, Law School, China

One of most important experience of teaching non-legal back ground students is that, in the process of teaching, it is necessary for teachers to teach students some basic law knowledge, this will be very helpful for these students to understand human rights issues. For teachers, teaching is also one process of studying. Teacher should give enough chances to students to express their own opinions about human rights in class, teachers will also  learn some new ideas about human rights from their opinions, or some of these opinions will be very helpul for teachers to think about some special human rights topics.

I would like to develop a web resource page for area educators who are interested in incorporating human rights in their classrooms at both the K-12 and university levels.  Do you know of any good websites with engaging, easy-to-use curricular resources that would be helpful for educators that are new to human rights education?  I'd welcome ideas in all areas of human rights education from around the world, including additional web resources that you use to teach about the application of human rights.

Mingzhen Ge, Shandong University, Human Rights Center, Law School, China

It is important to educate human rights educators, especially in developing countries. In China, in the past years, RWI and other Nordic human rights institutions have organized some programmes to educate human rights educators.

Mingzhen Ge, Shandong University, Human Rights Center, Law School, China

it is so nice to participate this dialogue, but for my schedule, I did not have enough time to come to net to discuss. I think different teachers use different resources and teaching methods, .Anyway, as teachers, we should study from each other in order to make human rights education more effective  in different cultures around the world.

Thanks a lot for Nancy's invitation  and other participator's exellent words in the past days.

Mingzhen Ge

Law School, Shandong University

Hongjialou No.5, Jinan , Shandong

China, 250100

Tele: 86-531-86672658

Mobile: 13256788368

Fax: 86-531-88566412

E-mail: gemingzhensina [dot] com

              gemingzhenyahoo [dot] com

i think curriculum resources and practical experience are two different entities, two different phenomenas linked with the socio-historic as well as economic existence of a given society or an individual. as far as pakistani societ is concerned it is going more decadant and conservative the more it pordouce decadant literates, because now a days curriculum resources are totally segregated from practical experience .

revolutionary critical pedagogy is still prohibited in our primitive pre industrial societies,because of the after math of post industrial re colonisation of the intellect and resources.

the root cause of fundamentalism and religious extremism is basically due to impoverished and decadant pre industrial superstructure, which is going towards collapse. there is an ideological rift between government sector and  private sector since post privitization and post liberalisation era. government sector is totally helpless and powerless infront of private sector and due to decadant pre industrial approach of our stupid policy makers it is going bad to worse. thats why madrassas are mashroming everywhere.

The general understanding of human rights and how they apply in our daily life is very under developed. While gross abuses are usually recognized, for example laws and practices that deny access by asylum seekers to health care, everyday practices that effectively deny access to health care are not usually recognized as abuses of human rights. For example lack of access by people with disabilities living in supported residential facilities to the health care services available in their local community. Given this it is very important to "translate" human rights principles into everyday language and to locate them in everyday experience. When we do this we start to transform the culture of our community into one that values human rights.

 Robin Kirk, Director, Duke University Human Rights Center, North Carolina, USA

I'm posting here a letter written by J. Paul Martin, a founder of the first US university human rights center (at Columbia), in response to an article aboutthe roe of human rights education in universities. Martin has, I think, a very traditional view -- human rights starts as a legal question, that then demands evidence, concrete policy recommendations and action. Students, then, learn the law, collect data and create new policy that better protects human rights. In this model, human rights study is practitioner based. 

Left out is the study of human rights itself -- how did it come about, why, what needs does it serve -- or neglect, who gets to decide, etc.  For the purpose of critical thinking, I think these are essential elements of any human rights program.I also think that Martin's view remains too law-centric. So much of what we consider the modern human rights movement is driven by non-lawyers using the powerful idea of human rights to press for an expansion of what is considered a "human right" -- specifically, I'm thinking of the Mexican activists who reinterpret the UDHR to support their contention that abortion is a human right or the battle that took place among Amnesty volunteers to press the organization to work on sexual orientation as a human rights.

Human Rights Makes its Bid at the Global University Jon Cioschi, Summer 2008

To the Editor:

Jon Cioschi’s article provides a fair overview of human rights studies at Barnard and Columbia Colleges. In the process he raises the question: what is a good human rights program in a liberal arts curriculum? Here, as in most other universities, human rights studies were nurtured in the Law School, especially in the field of international law. However, it soon became obvious that both the analysis of, and the remedies for, human rights abuses called for the insights of the social sciences and the humanities. Legal scholars began using the latter and scholars outside the legal field began to draw on law and other normative frameworks. It was also apparent that the principles enunciated in the various human rights treaties had broad applicability, reaching into almost every aspect of human relations. Thus the language of human rights soon permeated international diplomacy and popular discourse. The net result is tangled webs of norms, facts, analysis, disciplines, and remedial propositions and actions, with a basic tension between norms and practice.

To provide a better frame of reference, I have proposed dividing the field into four main fields of intellectual endeavor, although in practice both scholars and activists may draw on all four. The fields are interdependent. Each field is defined by its radically different methodology that might or might not coincide with that of an academic discipline. The four fields are:

The Normative: This is the defining, unique characteristic of human rights studies. Fundamentally, it is the idea that there are certain legal norms, agreed upon by a given society or community of states and accepted as governing the treatment of human beings. The normative field of inquiry also examines other philosophical, cultural and religious norms. Law, especially international law, philosophy, cultural and religious studies, but also other humanities such as literature and media studies, play major roles in this field.

The Empirical: Accurate fact–finding and reporting has been the dominant and defining characteristic of the modern human rights movement. Equally necessary is an understanding of the numerous domestic and international institutions that are concerned with or impinge on human rights. The social sciences, statistics, and data management are major disciplinary resources in this field.

The Analytical: In the search for solutions, human rights scholars and advocates need to understand the underlying causes and interpretative frameworks and theories associated with complex social problems. We need to know the causes of abuses before we can hope to solve them. The social sciences have a big role to play here.

Implementation: Remedial and other activities, such as advocating, litigating, mobilizing, educating, and policy making, are designed to remedy human rights abuses, all of which will draw on the resources of the previous three competencies. Many disciplines and professions come into play here. This is the field of major and minor social engineering.

Each of these fields raises theoretical and practical problems and thus challenging debates. Human rights studies aims to develop the basic language and intellectual tools needed to participate in the whole range of normative and empirical debates and in the formulation of the policies and strategies designed to alleviate human rights abuses and violations.

Unfortunately, both scholars and practitioners often conflate the identification of problems, cause–effect postulates, and the identification of the best remedies. Equally dangerous are arguments based on unexamined normative, cultural, and historical assumptions. Human rights studies in the liberal arts curriculum draw on the resources of the social sciences and the humanities, as well as law, seeking to bring clarity and depth to both the intellectual debates and ongoing social interventions.

J. Paul Martin

Mingzhen Ge, Shandong University, Human Rights Center, Law School, China

Law School  undergraduate students nearly all have some basic theories about  human rights, so to encourage students to organize or participate some human rights based programms will be one better method of education, such as social investigation programmes about some special social human rights issues. For graduate students, human rights education is one process of researching about human rights, seminars or critical discuss will be very effective, comparative studying is nice way for them to deeply think about special human rights topics.

I would like to raise another challenge that I have found in terms of human rights education.  This is actually a problem I have seen in the area of global education more broadly in our community.  There is a disparity in access to human rights education.  The students participating in our programs at the high school level as well as at the university level are often more affluent students from high-quality schools who have had more opportunities to travel or to connect with students from other parts of the country or the world.  Many of these students have not experienced or witnessed human rights violations first-hand.  I think the use of simulations and practical experiences discussed in this dialogue help bring human rights to life, but I would like to also find ways to reach under-privileged students in our area with human rights education, and bring in their perspectives and experiences. Have others had this experience?  I'd be interested in hearing from you about ways to encourage broader access to human rights education.

Welcome to everyone!

I have been engaged in clinical education for 5 years now, currently as the Coordinator of the Human Rights Section of the Legal Clinic. I would like to share my experience on how it is a valuable method and how I believe it can be expanded beyond traditional use.

Legal Clinics as a concept have been first introduced in US academic education. The idea behind the concept is that students of law (primarily, but as you will see there are many possibilities to expand the concept beyond traditional application) offer free of charge legal information and assisstance to persons whose rights have been violated and  who due to various reasons, such as lack of financial means e.g., cannot afford a hired representative. The Clinics usually operate within the University system, with designated members of the teaching body guiding and supervising students' work. Moreover, students participate in the programme as a part of their curriculum and their work is awarded a note/credit at the end. To this end the Legal Clinic concept bring together voluntarism and gaining practical training.

There are various organization schemed used in Legal Clinics around the world, but usually the following solutions are applied: 

• the work is usually organized in thematic sections to allow participants select the area, in which they have a particular interest (e.g. criminal law) or where they can make use of their skills (e.g. fluent foreign language speakers may found it inspiring to work in an immigration law clinic)
• students  undergo a training session of some kind upon starting their work and their practical work is combined with deep research on legal and other questions on merits of the case they are working on
• students are usually assigned to specific cases, which they work on and are responsible for. That is meant to enhance student's responsibility and engagement in "his" or "her" case. Sometimes students work in pairs.
• there are frequent meetings, where students share their experience and receive feedback from the supervisiors and the whole group during discussion. 

As stated above the clinical education concept evolved with regard to legal academic education, but there are certain features of the concept, which make it,  believe, useful for incorporating human rights practical experience in other educational setting and levels. 

Below are some ideas:

• organization of a discussion group, where students/pupils work on a specific human rights case and attempt to come up with a suitable solution - for a variety of issues the New Tactics Tactical Notebooks can be used to present the problem to participants (without giving the original solution), gather their ideas and confront them in a discussion with the solution adopted in the case to discuss.
• engage students in a brainstorming session on a current human rights issue in the local/regional area to aks them how their competencies/knowledge/skills might be used to work out a solution to this problem and how it can be made into a practical real-life campaign. This involves examination of the problems, establising what is its nature and, critical assessment of own competencies and the scope of influence they may have on the problem. Usually various techniques would appear (e.g. information campaign prepared by journalism students, legal counselling by law/administration students, artwork display by art students etc). The idea is to make students think of their skills as assets in responding to direct comunity needs and additionally empower them to see themselves as active participants and not passive observers)
•  various variation on the Moot Court concept, widely used in law schools as mock court proceedings on a ficional case, where students provide arguments to both sides of the dispute and plead their case. The added value of providing a similar concept for real practical human rights cases  and asking students/pupils to provide argumentation to both sides of the dispute is that in cases involving concurring interests, the students are made aware of the complicity of some issues and how succesful solutions often need a good deal of bargaining to coverer justified but concurring interest and rights.

I have been using those ideas in my work and found them very effective both in academic setting and in our programms addressed to pupils. There are however some specific challenges one needs to be aware of to better address them:

• real-life examples need to be used with addition care, so that the interested parties are not victimized and unintentionally expolited. That might involve anonimization of the vulnerable data.
• whenever practical assisstance is provided, higher risk of burnout  is present, should the case be not succesful (instantly or at all). All participants need to be realistic about their possible impact on the case and the fact that they do not bear obligation for sucessful results, but for their own effeort and goodwill while attempting to suceed
• practical involvement in some human rights issues might be difficlult or not welcome to the educational institution you are working with. That involves careful planning and clear educational impact of your initiative, so that it does not conflict with student's other committments and curriculum activities.  

There is a lot of various subjects above and many of them rise several practical questions. I would be eager to know if you have made some similar experience with the clinical model and/or you feel it might work in your context.

Jadwiga Maczynska

Abigail Booth, Programme Manager, Head of Nairobi Office, Raoul Wallenberg Institute, Kenya

I think we have a lot to learn from colleagues in other parts of the world (I have noted that most of the discussion so far has been dominated by western institutions). As I have mentioned, real life experience of human rights violations is often the starting point, at least as far as I have seen here in Kenya. Theory comes later. Thus, most students have a fair understanding of the problems that exist in implementing human rights before they reach university. Linking practice and theory is still an issue but probably in a different way from in the US or Europe. I think there are some really good examples of how this is being done on the African continent and I wish that some of my colleagues from this region were taking part in this discussion. One example is the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria (www.chr.up.ac.za ) who use some really innovative methodologies in their programmes. There is also a Centre for Human Rights being set up at the University of Nairobi which is truly multidisciplinary and aims to really link university education to the practical realities of the country. I hope we get some input from them during the week! 

I also think that we have a lot to learn from other forms of human rights education. There is an awful lot of human rights training, civic education, etc going on and organisations working in this field are constantly developing their approaches and methodology and are often freer to do so outside of the academic setting. Although much of this is perhaps oriented towards adult learners and practitioners, I still think they have alot to offer academia.

An example is applying a human rights based approach to training and education. Just because we teach human rights does not mean that we necessarily are human rights based while doing it. A human rightsbased pedagogy would necessitate applying human rights principles in all stages of the teaching and learning process, including in curricula development, examination forms, pedagogical approaches, etc. It would necessitate greater participation of students, applying more participatory learning and building on the ideas and experiences of students rather than the traditional one-way teaching approach of universities. It would force us to reflect about issues of discrimination, accountability, transparency, etc. I believe that many universities include these principles automatically when modernising their programmes, but it would be interesting to develop a specific human rights pedagogy. This is something that is currently ongoing at RWI, but I am not sure exactly how far we have got. I would be very interested to hear any input on this idea, if any of you consciously apply a human rights based approach in the classroom and if so what your experiences have been?

Hello Irfan,

Welcome to the New Tactics community and dialogue. You have raised a very important point regarding human rights education. I would like to share with you a wonderful resource that was developed by a national commission in Indonesia that was set up to explore the cultural and religious barriers to human rights education in Indonesia and how they engaged religious and community leaders to develop the educational resources for the national education curriculums.

This in-depth case study that we call a tactical notebook is titled: Human Rights Advocacy Utilizing Religious Perspectives and Opinion Leaders: Promoting National Human Rights Education in Indonesia. The process was engaged specifically to "address human rights values as in the Indonesian cultural and religious context and designed with the consultation and assistance [of religious and opinion leaders] in order to overcome the perception that human rights values are Western concepts that impinge upon Indonesian cultural and religious values. Instead, the process has lead to a mutual recognition of basic human values."

Perhaps this experience from Indonesia might provide you with some potential ideas for considering their merit and adapting to your context in Pakistan. I would be very interested to hear your ideas on this.

It is great to have your comments in the dialogue as you bring a very valuable perspective and raise challenges regarding human rights education that confront us in different ways.

Nancy Pearson, New Tactics in Human Rights Program Manager

Irfan,

 I am tremendously impressed that you are teaching human rights in this context.  Are you well supported by your academic institution? How do the students and the school administration respond to thes ideas?  I think it would be wonderful for your students to interact with western students so that they can each learn from the other's experience.  

Barbara Frey, Director, Human Rights Program, University of Minnesota, USA

Dear Nancy Pearsun,

Greetings!.  I have been associated with Human Rights Education in Higher Education Institution through a project organised by International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF) Oxford, now shited to Japan. I am acting as a fecilitator.

About 40 to 50 participants selected from varios religious backgrounds are given Human Rights Training for 5sessions mostly speard for two consequtive days.

The material was jointly prepared by PDHRE and IARF.  The three short vedio films depicting the inter religious, intra religious andconflicting faiths and beliefs are being used in the training programmes as a teaser for initiating discussions and arraiving at a working plan.  In the course of training UDHR and Declarationon the Elimination of all forms of intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief (DIDRB) are discussed in detail.  Mostly participatory methodology is followed.

Though the programme was planned at South Asia, in India the first phase with the financial support of Netherland Government was completed successfully. The Second phase is to be stated from December 2008.

The feedback of the students is very encouraging. 

G.Rajaram

Irfan,

You have raised a foundational aspect and challenge of human rights education - opening our human consciousness and understanding regarding our profound human commonalities while developing an equally profound acceptance and willingness to grapple nonviolently with the unique ways in which we express those commonalities (via faith, culture, language, etc) that are so often viewed as impingements or threats.

I would like to share another New Tactics resource that was developed to overcome stereotypes, racism and fear between refugee and immigrant populations in Austria and the police titled Tandem©: Cross-cultural exchange between police and migrants.  The process they used was built from a method of language learning called "Tadem". It involved\s a pairing of two people - and in the way they adapted the method for human rights learning - was to pair a migrant (refugee or immigrant) with a police officer. They took a series of human rights education courses together that incorporated a practical experience component. Each pair discussed and decided on their own what kind of joint project they would do together. This joint project gave them an opportunity to learn more about each other as people with a common interest or at least a common goal they were working on together for the duration of the course. It has had profound affects on both the police and the migrants who have participated.

An adaptation of this kind of model might be useful for youth to build cross-cultural understanding in the communities where you are working in Pakistan. I'm interested to learn your reaction to such an application of this kind of education model. 

Nancy Pearson, New Tactics in Human Rights Program Manager

Hello Irfan, you raise a very important point about addressing the underlying causes of stereotypes.  I organize interactive programs for high school students on various global topics.  I am often inspired by the openness of the students, even among who have rarely interacted with anyone from a different racial, ethnic or religious background.  However, I have also been very concerned about the level of ignorance about other cultures and societies among students.  Occasionally I have been shocked by misinformation that some of the students bring to the discussions.  I am sometimes very disheartened by the magnitude of the problem, and have to hope that the work we do as educators can help in some small way.  Did you find that the youth assembly helped to change the perspectives of the students who participated?

Dear Irfan,  Thank you so much for your comments.    I really sympathize with you because even under the best of circumstances, it is so difficult to change mindsets if students are immersed in an environment that supports extremism, intolerance or human rights abuses.  So much education takes place in the home or in the broader community, and it can take a lot of courage to take a different path, especially in the difficult context you are working in.   I commend you for your dedication and for the incredibly challenging work you are doing to create peace and tolerance in your community.

Dear Rachid,Thank you so much for your inquiry. Human rights in the medical field is an especially important profession to instill this line of thinking. The "first do no harm" directive for those in the medical, psychological and social service professions is one of the core foundations of human rights work. The use of torture can continue to exist because medical professionals are still used (and too often coercered) into providing their medical expertise to determine if a prisoner is still capable of surviving torture; or where the medical professional is asked (or required - again by coercive means) to provide a death certificate that fasifies the real foresic evidence regarding how a person died. So you are quite right, that students need to see how crucial their medical expertise is to not only stopping, deterring and also healing the wounds of human rights violations.At a less direct level, because moving right to tortue prevention can be quite intimidating for students just coming in to a profession, I would like to direct you to a wonderful in-depth case example that you could use in your course that highlights HIV/AIDS prevention - Engaging Key Stakeholders: Ensuring the right to HIV/AIDS education and health care services - as a great introduction for medical students to look at human rights issues coming from Bangladesh.If you'd like to look at the issue of the torture and how the medical profession intervened in Romania - I'd highly recommend our tactical notebook (in-depth case study) called, Making the State Pay, that highlights the provision of medical care services to survivors of torture. Another excellent example concerning the work of forensic anthopologists is found in a tactical notebook titled, Uncovering the Evidence. Each of these in-depth case studies offers some unique insights into the special role of different field of medical expertise and professionals and human rights.

Let me know if these resources are the kinds of resources you had in mind for introducing to your students and if you find them useful.

Nancy Pearson, New Tactics in Human Rights Program Manager