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The Human Rights Advocacy Center was established
in 1998 as an action-oriented interdisciplinary program to:
(a) provide legal advocacy assistance to human rights
organizations around the world, while offering hands-on advocacy
training to DU graduate students in international studies, law,
and other disciplines, and
(b) aid in establishing and providing collaborative support
to, legal aid/human rights clinics in law schools in developing
countries.
(c) represent asylum seekers – foreigners fleeing
persecution in their home countries – in the Denver metropolitan
area.
The Center has established relationships with attorneys and activists
working in Africa, Latin America, Australia, South and Central
Asia and Eastern Europe and has provided legal advocacy, research
and consulting to a variety of national and international non-governmental
organizations.
The Center offers an active and wide-ranging program
of experiential education for graduate and law students at DU.
In response to requests, it provides human rights attorneys and
non-governmental organizations with comprehensive and well researched
memoranda and reports. For example, a multi-disciplinary team prepared
a report, Bhutan, The Right to Return,
for Amnesty International's Legal Support Network in June of 1999.
Some examples of over sixty human rights advocacy
projects undertaken by the Center’s students include:
(a) the denial of property rights of ethnic Serbs in Croatia;
(b) land rights of the Garifuna (Afro-Caribbean people)
in Honduras and Belize;
(c) the killing of Zambian tribespeople exercising subsistence
hunting rights on a national game preserve;
(d) honor killings and violence against women in Pakistan;
(e) trafficking of girls in Nepal;
(f) obtaining political asylum in the U.S. for 25 refugees
from West and East Africa, Tibet, Nepal, Russia and several Latin
American countries;
(g) filing a petition with the U.N. on behalf of Ngarrindjeri
aboriginal people in South Australia and the Nubian tribe in Kenya
in order to protect their land rights and cultural integrity.
Students have followed up their project reports with on-site internships,
e.g. in Bosnia, Croatia, Uzbekistan, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, India,
Nepal, Belize, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru
as well as Israel and the West Bank.
Currently the Center's projects focus is (although
not exclusively) in three specific areas:
The Advocacy Center is directed by Robert
Golten, an adjunct professor at GSIS.
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