Aoife Nolan, University of Nottingham and Rosa Freedman, University of Birmingham
The use of unpaid internships in the human rights sector has ballooned in recent years. While human rights bodies have employed interns in a general work experience capacity for decades, the last few years have seen an upsurge in the use of interns to support the work of human rights actors, including UN human rights experts and monitoring bodies. Read more
Rosa’s latest piece for The Conversation:
“Recent reports have indicated that the Home Office has enjoyed access to the NHS records of more than 6,900 people since 2010, and used information from them for ramped-up efforts to track down illegal migrants.
While data protection laws protect medical records from most types of scrutiny, a largely overlooked exemption has allowed the government to directly access patients’ non-clinical records. No court order is required for this access.”
Read more:
Snooping on irregular migrants breaches their human rights – and puts us all at risk.
Weekly column at the THE: Professor Geoffrey Alderman is reading Rosa’s The United Nations Human Rights Council: A Critique and Early Assessment.
Rosa blogged at the Universal Rights Group.
“On 20th March 2014 the International Service for Human Rights (ISHR) attempted to hold a minute of silence in the UN Human Rights Council’s chamber in memory of Cao Shunli. Ms Cao was arrested on 14th September 2013 as she attempted to board a flight to Geneva. A human rights defender in China, Ms Cao was en route to the Human Rights Council to attend the September session. China’s authorities detained Ms Cao for 5 months and during that time failed to provide her with access to proper medical care…”
Failing To Protect: Systemic weaknesses within the UN human rights machinery.
Rosa writes for The Conversation:
“The United Nations Human Rights Council is tasked with the universal protection and promotion of human rights, and is the UN’s principal human rights body. Yet it is being used by known rights abusers to produce “soft law” that allows them to erode fundamental rights.”
UN Human Rights Council keeps up its bad form on LGBT rights.
(picture by torbakhopper 2012 https://flic.kr/p/didgDi)
The Freedom Rights Project is proud to welcome Dr. Rosa Freedman, Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, who will join the founders as a Principal Investigator. Dr. Freedman brings with her significant expertise in international human rights law and intimate knowledge of the workings of the UN Human Rights Council.
From the UK Human Rights Blog:
“On 21 May 2014, Hurst Publishers, Berwin Leighton Paisner LLP and the UK Human Rights Blog hosted a panel discussion on ‘The Future of Human Rights’ to mark the publication of Failing to Protect: the UN and the Politicisation of Human Rights by Dr Rosa Freedman.”
You can read an excerpt from Rosa’s latest book, Failing to Protect: The UN and the Politicisation of Human Rights at the IntLawGrrls blog.
“On 17th March 2008, I witnessed Mr Gibreil Hamid, a refugee from Darfur, addressing the United Nations Human Rights Council. Mr Hamid’s statement to the Council was brief. He mentioned three incidents within a conflict that had already claimed 200,000 lives and displaced two million people. Mr Hamid’s hands remained steady as he talked, but his eyes flickered nervously as he addressed people who were supposed to hold power to end such atrocities. Concisely and precisely, he told the Council how a report delivered earlier in the day demonstrated that ‘the Government of Sudan is violating human rights and international humanitarian law, with physical assaults, abductions and rape.’”
The book was launched in May 2014 at an event jointly hosted by Berwin Leighton Paisner solicitors and the UK Human Rights Blog.
Rosa was one of the guest speakers at the Freedom House and the Freedom Rights Project conference on 19 May 2014. You can see video from the panel on the UN Human Rights Council on their website:
http://www.freedomrights.info/activities/the-international-human-rights-system-a-missed-opportunity/
Rosa writes for The Conversation:
On 21 March, the Crown Prosecution Service announced the first prosecution of a person accused of female genital mutilation (FGM) in the UK. Dr Dhanuson Dharmasena, a doctor at the Whittington Hospital in London, will be prosecuted under Section 1(1) of the Female Genital Mutilation Act (2003).
via Britain’s first FGM prosecution is all too politically convenient.