Human rights

As the son of a Holocaust survivor family on my father’s side, I struggled during my early years with the concept of retributive punishment, given my desire for revenge against the Nazi regime and its surviving officials. As a young teenager, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted to do in my life. I wrote numerous unanswered letters to Simon Wiesenthal, the “Nazi hunter,” asking him to enlist me in his efforts. Happily, as I matured, my intellect, and emotional and moral core, evolved.

Several years ago, on a beautiful day, I visited the stately Wannsee Villa on the outskirts of Berlin, a totally incongruous site for the 1942 gathering that authored the Final Solution to the “Jewish question.” It is now a museum.

There hang framed photographs and biographies of the participants, including Eichmann and Heydrich. The great plurality of them were highly educated, and included lawyers and doctors. I always stressed to my students that education alone, absent moral reasoning, is insufficient to guard against atrocity and reprehensible action, and I use Wannsee as one example.

I have always understood the Holocaust (Shoah) as an atrocity against all of humanity, and I have sought to ensure that the admonishment “Never Again” is applied universally. This has informed my approach to the entirety of global human rights concerns.

Throughout my life and career as an educator and activist, I have been concerned with recognizing the equality of all people, the quest for economic equity, criminal justice reform, and ensuring journalistic freedom. Accountability for war crimes, and securing transnational governance of justice through the ICC and other institutions, remains another core concern. These are principles that I pursued at the Institute, through yearlong EPIIC efforts - 1999’s Global Crime, Corruption, and Accountability, 2001’s Race and Ethnicity: A Global Inquiry, 2003’s Global Inequities, 2008’s Global Poverty and Inequality, and other forums. Even when we explored Global Games in 2000, an important lens was understanding racial issues, human rights concerns, and social responsibility.

During the Race and Ethnicity year, with the Tufts Philosophy Department, I convened a workshop on “Race and the Death Penalty in the US” with Professor Hugo Adam Bedau, who informed and inspired me on the devastation of the death penalty. I continued this concern with the Petra Foundation in 2013, directed by a close friend, Dick Balzer; Iniquities and Inequities in the U.S. Criminal Justice System, and in 2014 with the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy with a co-sponsored symposium on Confronting the Death Penalty. A participant of the latter forum, John Artis, was a co-recipient of the Institute’s Dr. Jean Mayer Award in 2015, with his close friend Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. We brought the archives of their wrongful imprisonment to the Institute.

I continue to understand corruption and specifically state grand corruption, as a critical and core human rights concern. With my students we created a special Institute program, the Power, Poverty Research Initiative, and the Bory Damyanova Award program in honor of a deceased wonderful Institute student, understanding that corruption destroys the very common/wealth necessary to redress all other human rights concerns.

At Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, I returned to the findings of Global Crime, Corruption, and Accountability, and particularly that year’s workshop on “Exposing Transnational Crime and Corruption.” I am engaged the creation of an Anti Corruption Data Collective, under the leadership of our friend Frederik Obermaier, other investigative journalists and corruption experts derived from the concept of convening of a “Transparathon.”

Throughout, I have enabled, and continue to enable, students to form reciprocal relationships with human rights and civil liberties activists, assist those activists in their work, and to become more deeply aware of and involved in human rights issues. I created the Oslo Scholars program with the Human Rights Foundation, which The Trebuchet has successfully expanded to Harvard. The Carter archives were brought to the Institute with the explicit intent of serving as an active resource for student research on current criminal justice cases, which we are seeking to ensure through The Trebuchet. The Institute sponsored thousands of student research projects and initiatives, and I continue now to mentor current students as they explore human rights. Our traditional concerns with oppressed minorities, including the Uyghur and Rohingya, and repressive regimes, from Iran to Venezuela remain.