In Spring 2012, CAP is hosting a Luncheon Series with HLS Graduate Program students and visitors.
More about the series: Each session a different presenter will discuss his/her work-in-progress, and luncheon attendees will have the opportunity to brainstorm and provide feedback and suggestions on the presenter’s project. Lunch will be provided.
Prosecuting the Recruitment of Child Soldiers as a War Crime before the International Criminal Court. A Critical Reading of the Lubanga Case
Discussion with Harvard Law School Visiting Researcher Mahyad Hassanzadeh-Tavakoli
Thurs, February 23, 2012
Noon – 1:00 PM
WCC 4133
Harvard Law School
Paper Topic: Article 8(2)(b)(xxvi) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court stipulates that the recruitment and enlisting of children under the age of fifteen years into the national armed forces, or using them to participate actively in hostilities, is to be regarded as a war crime. The issue has most notably been dealt with by the Court in the Lubanga Case. The handling of the case by the ICC Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) has been criticized by different human rights organizations on several grounds. These grounds will be enquired into and discussed in the paper.
Biography: Mahyad Hassanzadeh-Tavakoli is a Ph.D candidate in public international law at Umeå University, Sweden. Her research deals with the tension between the universal view on human rights and the doctrine of cultural relativism. The main purpose of her doctoral thesis is to examine the meaning and practical application of the state’s responsibility to enforce core human rights in the context of plural legal orders.
Mahyad has previously, among other things, worked as a protection lawyer at the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and carried out field research in India and Pakistan regarding human rights implementation. On a voluntary basis, she has worked as a human rights activist for Amnesty International for nearly a decade and held an elective office as a member of the national board of directors for the organization. Mahyad will spend the academic year of 2011/2012 as a visiting researcher and Fulbright grantee at Harvard Law School.
Contesting Childhood: When Law and Politics go to School
Discussion with Harvard Law School SJD Candidate Lisa Kelly
Thurs, March 8, 2012
Noon – 1:00 PM
WCC 4133
Harvard Law School
Paper Topic: There are few experiences more formative for North American children today than “going to school.” This was not the case just a century and a half ago. In Canada and the United States, universal public schooling was only established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and even then applied unevenly according to race and aboriginality. Compulsory schooling emerged as part of a larger social, economic, and cultural transformation of childhood. Progressive-era reformers advocated for a trifecta of laws that would shield the newly innocent (white) child from the moral and material dangers of the adult spheres of work and prison. Child labor prohibitions, mandatory schooling laws, and the creation of a separate juvenile justice system worked in tandem to demarcate childhood from adulthood.
These legal reforms also redistributed authority over the child from the near-exclusive domain of the parental household to the shared authority of the state. In this presentation, I will discuss how the seeds of “family privacy” were sewn – and also retroactively invented – in response to these redistributions between family and state in the context of mandatory schooling. I will consider how the question of who shall govern the child – the family or the state – has been central to twentieth-century and contemporary struggles over race, sexuality, and student conduct at school. I conclude by asking where “the child” herself is left throughout such struggles.
Biography: Lisa Kelly is a doctoral (S.J.D.) candidate at Harvard Law School where her research focuses on family law, criminal law, education law, and sexual and reproductive health law. Her doctoral dissertation analyzes the legal regulation of the child at school and the law and politics of universal schooling. Lisa Kelly is a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow, a Trudeau Scholar, and a Doctoral Fellow of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. After graduating from the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law, she articled with the Department of Justice in Ottawa and also clerked for Justice Marshall Rothstein of the Supreme Court of Canada. Lisa recently served as a legal intern with the Sex Work project at Pivot Legal Society in Vancouver, Canada.
The Street Children of Rio de Janeiro
Discussion with Harvard Law School Visiting Researcher Celina Beatriz Mendes de Almeida
Thurs, March 22, 2012
Noon – 1:00 PM
WCC 4133
Harvard Law School
Paper Topic: The paper will discuss the public policy that is being implemented by Rio de Janeiro’s municipal government regarding street children. Since May 2011, street children, including those with drug abuse, are being taken by force out of the streets and being kept in foster houses. This policy has been highly criticized by human rights groups and NGO’s working with children’s right who claim this policy is illegal, against national and international norms for the protection of the child.
Biography: Celina Beatriz Mendes de Almeida is a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School and a consultant for the International Human Rights Clinic at HLS. She graduated from the LLM program in 2010 and last year worked as a Kaufman Fellow at Human Rights Watch serving the America’s Division. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (2008) where she also worked as a researcher at the Human Rights Center focusing on the Inter-American System of Human Rights. Celina is also part of a NGO that provides legal aid for street children in Rio (Centro de Defesa dos Direitos da Criança e Adolescentes CEDECA – Rio de Janeiro). Besides her interest in street children she is researching on police violence issues and on the prison system in Brazil.