Speaker 1: Good morning, everyone. My name is Camilo Sanchez. I joined the faculty last year as a clinical professor in international human rights law, and I am the co-director of the Human Rights Program. And I teach the clinic on human rights and also the Human Rights Study Project. So the idea is to do a short introduction on what we do in terms of human rights here at the law school, and then hear your thoughts and your questions about that. So I'll do my best to try to answer your concerns and questions. So I'm going to go 10 to 15 minutes first to give out an overview, and then we'll take the questions, all right? OK, so thinking on how to present this, I thought the best way to do it was to split this into two different moments. First, to explain the values and the philosophy that we have in the way that we teach human rights, and second, to explain how we do it and the courses that we have and the offers that we have here. So for the first part, some of you would be, or some people would have actually told you that it's kind of odd, an odd moment to start studying human rights law, right? So some people would say, like, oh, you want to do, oh, so cute, you want to do human rights. That's so 80s, you know? And it feels that way. You know, we see the rise of illiberal democracies around the world from India to Russia, from Turkey to Brazil, from Hungary to the Philippines. So something is happening in the world. Second, there are major changes in the global order, long-term shifts, for example, in geopolitics and the use of technology and connectivity in the world. That kind of updates the way in which human rights was practiced and in the way that human rights was thought and taught. So for that is that many people today say that human rights are in crisis, and there is a crisis in human rights. So our take here at UVA Law School, at our human rights program, is that we don't kind of like the idea of crisis. We see it as a moment of transition. And with transitions, of course, you'll have moments of uncertainty, but also of opportunity. And that's where we want to position ourselves and to say, this is a transition, and what we want to do is to be part of that, to give our students an opportunity to be part of this, in which I think is a moment of transformation. So that's how we tackle these issues and how we use the current political framework into what we do in the classroom and outside the classroom here. So the goal, basically, is how to prepare and train the human rights advocates that will lead this process and that will be advocating for human rights after this transition process is over. That is what we are trying to do here. So I often tell my students and my colleagues, I'm not interested at all in teaching or educating my younger self, in treating my students like I was 20 years ago, and to teach them how successful or unsuccessful I was in practice, using the tools that I had at my disposal 20 years ago doing human rights. What I want to do is to lead my students to be the agents, to be the drivers for change in this new human rights field. That's what I want to do. So what I want to do is to open the doors for you to think about how the human rights field should look like in the future, if not today. So it is not about the past. It is about the future, how we see and how human rights are going to fit in the new world that we are going to have. So that's basically what I try to do and what we at the Human Rights Program are looking at all of these issues. So sometimes some practitioners, I have many friends that are practitioners, and they tell me, you know what? It is most challenging about your job is that you are teaching people how to do a job that does not necessarily exist at this time. I'm sure you've heard many times that most of the jobs that you are going to do don't exist at this time because the world is changing. And I tell them, no, that is not my job. That is not how I see my challenge. My challenge is to work with my students to help them create and invent the jobs that they would like to do in order to be effective human rights advocates and lawyers in the future. That is the idea, and that's how we tackle this. And for that, what we do here is we spend time or we try to spend time identifying current trends and studying them. Second, what we do a lot is we try to use tools that kind of predict or try to predict changes in trajectories. And third, we try to promote creative thinking and innovation. Those are three things that, to me, are very important, not only in legal education in every branch of law, but for human rights law today is critical. Not only how well you can read treaties and treaty law and legal standards and make arguments, of course, that's important. But for me, that's a given. Today, it is very much important to try to anticipate to those changes. I'm from Colombia. I was educated in Colombia. I lived in Colombia for the better part of my life. And after we did this peace agreement, we had a referendum. And we consulted people. Do you want this peace agreement or no? And most people said no. And we're like, oh. And I think that is the thing that cannot happen. You need to anticipate and to work around those issues. So that's what we are trying to do with our legal education here and our take on human rights. So let me just put an example on the shift in communications that many people are trying right now, and I think it's key in all of this discussion. Because as communicators, I think older generation of human rights defenders, we kind of did not very successful. Not to say that we suck. Because we advocate for the rights of everyone. It's for everyone's right. So everyone would be on our side. And we usually are the minority in every discussion. Haven't you been part of that? Haven't you been part of that? The only one, the standalone, the minority. So we are not good at communicating. So for example, shifts that I think have been important and we are trying with that. Talk more about solutions and not only problems. Highlight what we stand for and not necessarily what we oppose to. Focus on creating opportunities and not only on threats. If the government doesn't do this, we are going to sue. Or we are going to do that. Changing kind of the language. And finally, emphasizing the support for heroes and no pity for victims. So that's what I'm talking about. How to confront all of this and how to change that and to include that into your legal education. And I've taken too long. But then the way how we do this, we have a broad offer on different classroom activities and extracurricular activities. I would say that mainly thematically, we are divided into two groups. One is on international human rights law and then domestic constitutional law. In the international side, you'll have hands-on education. We have a clinic, the clinic that I am now directing. And also, I would say that we have three ways to teach international human rights law. One is a theoretical legal education in which you will have international human rights law, international humanitarian law, and other classes. And second, we have the clinic which we take and we partner with organizations across the globe and we work on real cases and real projects. And third, a class on how to conduct research on human rights, and specifically on human rights issues and how to do it ethically and effectively. And for that, we call that the Human Rights Study Project. I invite you to search our website and look at the video. We have a recently made video on our last trip to Nepal. That was very cool because we went to the Himalayas, to Everest Base Camp, and that was part of what we consider a learning experience in a way that we didn't only have regular meetings with human rights defenders and government and other actors, but also we had time to reflect and to think in a different environment. That I think it's key to this idea of innovative, creative thinking. So that's part of what we do. And we also have, within the Human Rights Program, we have a year-long speakers series event in which we invite practitioners and scholars from different realms, some more from an academic take, some others more from the practitioner's take, to come here and to share their experience. And we do that throughout the year. We also are working really hard on spotting opportunities for recent graduates or for students to spend time abroad, both abroad here in the US, working with human rights issues. And as we see it, our role is not to, it is not that we want to be ambitious. And that's what I think that we need to take this as an opportunity for transitioning. But it's not that we are creating the human rights avengers. I'm not the Stan Lee of human rights. Far from that. But how to connect people and how to create leaders that can create opportunities and contribute to change from different perspectives, different realms, from different positions. So it is not that we are trying to educate the role model NGO person that is going to work for a nonprofit. And that's the only way to do human rights work. You can do, and we take it like that, you can promote human rights from private practice, from government, internationally, domestically. It is how you understand your opportunities and how you connect all of those opportunities and mobilize your resources to do that. That is the idea of how to do it cleverly. That's what we are very invested and interested in. So that's me. Now, questions?

Speaker 2: Do you see people coming out with an interest in international human rights going straight into those jobs in that field? Or do they tend to get experience in entry-level private practice jobs and then transition later?

Speaker 1: Both ways. There are some people, for example, that are truly interested in human rights activism, primarily. And they try to use their first summer to go to, usually, an international organization. For example, the ICC, the International Criminal Court, or the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, DC, something like that. And usually, for their second summer, they go to a big human rights NGO, here or abroad. Just try to have two different experiences. And some others try government. So we have very successful examples of people that say, like, mm, yeah. But what I think is that I need more skills and tools litigating cases. So maybe if I go to the Department of Justice or something like that, I'll get that. Or some people that see that the future here is the connection between human rights and corruption and anti-corruption laws. So I'm going to take private practice into that field in order to have an added value when I am in practice and when I want to be part of this discussion. So we have different takes. And I think many students successfully have done it through all sorts of ways. And I think that's key. OK, no questions.

Speaker 3: Go ahead. You said you go to the US and Nepal during the clinic. What kind of trips do you take during your clinics? And what do you do when you're in those other countries?

Speaker 1: OK, great. So Nepal was part of what we call the Human Rights Study Project. And what we do is that is a year-long course in which, first, during the fall semester, we start to learn about how to conduct human rights research. And we do background research on the country that we pick. So for example, in this case, we started to study Nepal. But also we started to work with what does it mean to do no harm when you're doing or conducting human rights studies? What are the precautions that we would have? What are the important factors that we need to take into account once we are there? How are we going to behave? And what would be considered ethically human rights work? So we did that during the fall. Then in January term, we went to Nepal. We went to Kathmandu first. We met with different stakeholders, government, civil society organization, independent journalists, international community working there. And then we went to Pokhara, which is the second largest city in Nepal. And we met with others of people, academia, and others. And after that, we did a trek in the Khumbu region. And for that, we had other partners and alumni that joined the trip. And they were experts on different issues. So they helped us to understand what we just witnessed. And we had really good conversations about how to relate that to a broader idea of practice and also human rights and problems and the differences and different takes on that. So that's what we did. With the clinic, what we do is that we partner with an NGO or an international organization in order to conduct a project throughout the year. So for example, this year, we tried to have some projects that kind of bridge the gap, the existing gaps between practice. Because what you find these days a lot is that people don't talk to each other. So one example is those who work on international investment treaty law and those who work on human rights. They affect each other, but they don't talk. So one of our projects was try to make the connection and to call on those who work on international treaty law to say, look, human rights are important. Because if you don't take into consideration this, then when you're implementing your project, chances are that you're going to have a community that will want to work with you or rejecting your project or something like that. You have to take that into consideration. And on the other hand, to tell human rights people, look, this exists. And this is also a body of law. And if you just go recommending states, for example, the Inter-American Commission, if you go recommending states, oh, don't do that, states are going to say, what? I need to get money somehow to pay the bills. So to bridge that. So that's part of what we did with the clinic this year. We did that also with fiscal policies on human rights. And we also had a project on migrants. We partnered with the UN Committee on Migrant Workers because they are working on a document setting the standard for detention and deprivation of liberty of migrants. Something that is very close to what is happening here in the US. So for example, we're working on that. So that's kind of how we try to integrate all of this vision into what we do during the year. The clinic is also a year-long commitment. OK, I don't know what to do. OK, go ahead.

Speaker 3: I just had a question in relation to people of an interest in particularly focusing on civilians in armed conflicts and refugees as well. I guess there's a combination of clinics and, of course, you just described opportunities and pathways that students tend to go from UVA if they have that sort of an interest.

Speaker 1: Yes. Actually, next week, I don't know if you've seen the flyers, next week we're having an alumna that's coming here. She's been working for the residual tribunals for what happened in the Balkans 20 or 30 years ago now. I keep thinking that when I say 20 years ago, it's the 70s. But yes, so we have different people that have used that knowledge and the training that they've gotten here, working in different parts of the world and with different issues regarding international humanitarian law, for example, operations law, how they call it here in the Jack School, and kind of doing either justice, humanitarian intervention, different takes on that, and also with refugees. Actually, the clinic is now working with a different project. It's working with Venezuelan migrants in Latin American countries. Because as Latin America was always a sending country, a sending region to Spain, to the US, we were not prepared at all to receive migrants. So now what we found is that all of the systems for refugees are completely useless. They make no determination when they do it. It is not according to law. They don't even know the applicable law. Funny fact is that back in the 90s, the Latin American countries signed the Cartagena Declaration, which expanded the notion of refugee, which is a really good thing. Because the international notion is only for those who have been prosecuted for political reasons. And they said, no, if there are systematic violations of human rights or civil unrest, we're going to actually cover those with the international protections. And now they don't know that they signed that. You know, we're very proud of UNEAR at the time they did it. And now we've got like, look, the Cartagena agreement exists. So we're working on that refugee at the Inter-American system. And I think that's something that is kind of new before what happened in Venezuela that was completely inexistent. And now we're seeing how important that is even here.

Speaker 4: So you talked about thinking about this as a transition period and innovating and anticipating on where we're going outside of the traditional legal study of international human rights. And so I know at UVA we have the opportunity to pursue dual degrees and to take courses outside of the law school. Can you speak to any of those opportunities that you think are particularly useful for folks interested in international human rights?

Speaker 1: One that I think it's very useful is a dual degree with Batten School, the MPP program. I think that's really important now. Because as these are very structural problems, unless you think of policy options for this, it's not going to be a very effective solution. So even in cases that we consider as isolated violations, you need to think systematically. So for me, public policy is just so important right now. I think everything that deals with data and how to analyze data is really key these days. It's not that we need to become math geeks and all that stuff to do our work. But unless we understand that and are part of the conversation, we are not going to be as effective as we want to and as we need to be. So that, too, would be very important. So time is up. So if you want more, come join us. Thank you.