Grassroots Visions, Global Tools: Strategies for Human Rights Clinics Supporting Localized Movements

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Session Type: Lightning Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Essex A & B

Floor: Fourth Floor

This session will focus on examples of Human Rights Clinics collaborating with grassroots movements, movement constituencies, and affected communities in the U.S. and around the world. Presenters will share strategies that their clinics have employed to work with movements and affected communities using the human rights framework. We will discuss the many challenges to engaging in long term movement and community support as clinics, including the semester timeline, student onboarding on complex factual situations and new (often multiple) areas of law, and addressing inherent power and resource disparities between clinics and grassroots partners. We will focus in particular on tools for helping students to obtain contextual understanding and participatory approaches to partner collaboration. In addition, through the case study examples, we will also reflect on how the movements and communities that we work with have resignified and transformed the human rights frame itself, sharing examples of clinics and their partners using the human rights discourse and human rights law towards distributional, decolonial, and structural goals. Such uses of the human rights discourse and human rights frameworks by grassroots actors are not always captured in mainstream critiques of human rights, and the role of these movements in progressively advancing international law is poorly understood. Examples will include clinics working with racial justice movements in the United States, international climate justice movements, and land movements in Latin America seeking distributional goals. How can clinics support movements, communities, and clients to push the boundaries of human rights discourse and use human rights in new and creative ways?