About the Buffalo Human Rights Center

As the focal point for human rights work at SUNY Buffalo School of Law, the Human Rights Center fosters coursework, research, and scholarship in human rights among faculty and students. Providing direction and vision to the study and practice of international human rights law, it is conceived on the premise that scholarship and action are inseparable. Consequently, the Center organizes student internships with leading human rights organizations worldwide, introducing students to the intellectual complexity of human rights law through practice. The Center also organizes speakers, conferences, and symposia with leading human rights thinkers and practitioners.

One of the most powerful ideas of our time, human rights are now embodied in an impressive collection of international treaties, processes and institutions. Because of the intersection in human rights of law, politics, morals, and ethics, the study of human rights at the University at Buffalo is inherently interdisciplinary. Similarly, the Center maintains a wide range of cooperative links with human rights organizations, human rights programs in other universities, think-tanks, and governmental or quasi-governmental agencies interested in human rights.

Substantively, the Human Rights Center seeks to bring attention to those areas of human rights discourse that are less explored and developed. It employs a critical approach to teaching, scholarship, and human rights practice. Thus, it focuses attention on the major conflicts and gaps in the discourse. These include: the intellectual, historical, and cultural origins of the human rights movement; the ideological and political orientation of human rights; its thematic incompleteness; the relationships among foreign policy, domestic legal and political processes, and sovereignty; the problems and tensions that attend the internationalization of the human rights corpus; debates relating to the under-representation of economic, social, and cultural rights; women's rights and the rights of cultural, ethnic, religious, and sexual groups and minorities; and the tension between culture, political traditions, and the rights idiom, among others.

The Human Rights Center is directed by Tara Melish (Law School) and Professor Claude E. Welch, Jr. (Political Science). Its Board of Directors is composed of prominent academics and leading human rights activists.