NYU Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights Blog

Meeting the Team

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Yassmine Hussein (NYU Gallatin) |Cairo 52| Cairo, Egypt

During my first team meeting with Cairo52, I had the chance to meet with several researchers and lawyers that represent the backbone of the organization’s functions. Cairo52 conducts an array of research around marginalized communities in Egypt, which is something I was aware of when I applied for my internship, however, what I was unaware of was the fact they also have a team of lawyers who provide legal aid and support to marginalized communities, especially low-income members of these communities. Cairo52’s approach is two-pronged, utilizing research and legal methods to help advocate for those in need of support and help. 

I could tell from our team meeting that the team functioned in a way that gave a large degree of autonomy to its members and specifically the researchers. Researchers are given the freedom to explore topics and issues they would like to take on and are guided by management-level team members throughout their process. More senior members provide them with guidance and recommendations which helps move their work forward. I am very appreciative of this organizational method of working as it truly creates a more horizontal organizational structure that allows for more creativity and initiative, something even I as an intern can see happening. I am currently meeting more frequently with two researchers on the team, after our initial team meeting I was given the space to decide which line of work I was interested in and the autonomy to join the researchers leading it. 

I am beyond excited as I commence my work both due to the environment I am interning in as well as the type of work these individuals are undertaking. Being able to connect with peers who are working on such sensitive topics in Egypt and have successfully been able to turn it into their professional career while navigating such a difficult political and social environment has been immense value added to me as a person as well. 

Exploring Nepal for a better understanding

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Puja Thapa (NYU GSAS)| WOREC Nepal| Kathmandu, Nepal

Two weeks into the internship, I embarked on a journey last week of June to Province 1 in Nepal, one of the two provinces where the largest shares of migrant workers are from, as stated in the Nepal Labor Migration Report. Over the past three weeks, I have been conducting fieldwork in Nepal’s Morang and Udayapur districts. I have had the opportunity to engage and learn from stakeholders such as aspirants and returnee migrant workers, government officials, and staff from different organizations and projects working for safe labor migration in Nepal.

The past three weeks have been a great eye-opening experience. As a Kathmandu native with limited knowledge about the eastern part of Nepal, I have been captivated by the geographical and cultural diversity. I have had the privilege of hearing different languages, eating unique fruits and vegetables, understanding diverse cultural practices, and gaining insight into the lives of people for whom labor migration has been an inseparable part.

I am pleasantly surprised by the increasing awareness among individuals regarding safe migration information. However, it is mainly confined to urban or accessible areas leaving remote rural communities with marginalized populations reliant on a few unlicensed local agents as their primary sources of labor migration information. While the government and various national and international organizations have implemented effective initiatives to reintegrate returnee migrants, there is still a significant lack of sustainability, according to the locals.

Applying a gender lens to my observation, I have discovered that men are generally unaware of the social stigmatization that women labor migrants and wives of men labor, migrants, endure. Carrying forward the patriarchal legacy of stigmatizing trafficking survivors, women labor migrants still face questioning and judgment, resulting in limited social support for their reintegration and silenced stories. However, this circumstance does not capture the entire picture. Throughout my journey, I have unlearned my limited understanding of female leadership in Nepal. Women Rehabilitation Center (WOREC) Nepal has played a crucial role in empowering local and indigenous women leaders to take charge and address issues that directly concern them, including the stigma surrounding women labor migrants.

While these findings are preliminary, I am eager to return to Kathmandu equipped with the knowledge I have acquired. I intend to synthesize my experiences and academic learnings from NYU into an assessment report for the organization that will contribute to a better understanding of the situation.

Internship Conclusions – NANSEN

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As the conclusion of my internship with NANSEN in Brussels, Belgium nears, I am grateful for everything I have learned. I have received more clarity about my career goals and academic interests. I am eager to take the learnings of my internship and apply them to my academics. Since I will be studying abroad in Paris next year, my newly deepened understanding of the EU political system as well as the French language, fostered through my internship, will serve me well. As a Global Liberal Studies major with a concentration in Politics, Rights, and Development, this internship has taught me various skills and given me the global political and legal contact I need to advance my studies and career. 

First Impressions Working at Nubian Rights Forum

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Alice Ni (NYU Gallatin) | Nubian Rights Forum | Nairobi, Kenya 

I have been working with Nubian Rights Forum for two weeks now, and my experience thus far has given me a deeper understanding of the issues surrounding identification laws and the overall political inequalities that exist in Kenya.

Nubian Rights Forum is located in the Kibera slum, within the Nubian community, which is the targeted beneficiary of the organization. NRF has close ties with the community: the chairman and multiple higher-ups were born and raised in Kibera, and the various community-oriented programs foster and strengthen those ties. Paralegals conduct outreach daily, where they visit the homes of clients to follow up on the process of obtaining identification, talk to potential clients who are apprehensive about interacting with government officials (and are therefore hesitant to apply for the ID card), and encourage new parents to obtain birth certificates for their children promptly so that their children will be able to enroll in school without issue and they will have an easier time obtaining their ID card after they turn 18. NRF also holds monthly community forums with different topics depending on the demographics of the participants, such as specificities for each step of the identification documentation process, updates on government policy, gender-based violence, female hygiene, and more. These forums are also an opportunity for NRF to identify possible candidates as community ambassadors, who work closely with the organization and assist in mobilizing the community. Some of the paralegals I worked with were ex-clients of NRF and gradually worked their way up to a full-time position from the position of community ambassador.

Participating in community outreach where I walked around the community and talked to people gave me a better understanding of both the issues the community faces and the discriminatory, arduous application processes for the requisite identification documents. The community suffers from a dire lack of physical infrastructure; much of the housing is made of wood and mud, with tin sheets covering the top of the structure and a thin layer of concrete spread outside the mud on the walls. There is no running water, and people have to refill their jugs from water trucks. Many residents relied on illegally tapping power lines as their sole source of electricity, but this method is unreliable and prone to frequent outages.

It is, however, impossible to obtain identification without access to electricity and the Internet. The application process for identification cards is hybrid, with both an in-person vetting component and a digital component, where payment and some information must be submitted through the Kenyan E-citizen portal. Although the ID card is indispensable for participating in society, there are no fee waivers available for low-income individuals, worsening their circumstances.

Worse still, applications for each piece of documentation build on top of others. For a child to obtain her birth certificate, she needs her parents’ ID cards (or death certificates if they are deceased). The birth certificate, in turn, is needed to apply for an ID card when a child turns 18. Driver’s licenses and passports subsequently build on the ID card. If any link in the chain is missing, it must be restored before one can proceed.

It is under this context that the Unique Personal Identifier (UPI) is being proposed in Kenya, immediately after the previous digitization attempt, Huduma Namba, was declared unconstitutional by the Kenyan High Court in 2021 before it was even implemented due to the excessive amount of biometric data collected. The UPI as currently written will lead to a centralized, digitized system, raising concerns about not only privacy and security, but also concerns regarding the allocation of government resources, as the Kenyan government is already carrying a concerning amount of debt and other infrastructure projects are in much more urgent need of investment.

Unemployment is also a major issue, in Kenya overall but especially problematic in Kibera, where estimates of the unemployment rate are consistently over 50%. I am currently working with my supervisor and the project manager on securing funding for garbage collection employment programs to clean up the community while also providing sustainable, long-term jobs. I hope to be able to receive some such funds and began to implement this project, and I will update you all on the progress!

First weeks in Mexico

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Laura Maria Rojas (NYU Gallatin) | Oxfam-Mexico| Mexico City, Mexico

I arrived in Mexico on June 22. The weather has been especially warm lately, which is not normal for this time of year in Mexico City. Days have passed quickly, and I have mostly been doing desk work, as I had anticipated before coming here.

Care, the topic I’m working on, is unique in both the human rights and public policy fields. Although it is not new and has been studied for decades by feminists, its relevance and usage in Latin America are very recent. Many dilemmas and questions regarding the distribution of care work remain unresolved.

Is care a human right? If it is, then what should the state do? Is it a pillar of the welfare state or part of the social security system? Does it have a gender focus or not necessarily? What exactly is a care system, and who should be its beneficiaries?

These debates are crucial, as their definitions directly shape the expectations and demands placed on states (and society in general) by feminist civil society groups and organizations like Oxfam-Mexico.

Of course, I am not going to answer these questions here, but I would like to share some of the things I have learned and done during my work in Mexico.

Several forums and debates are taking place across Latin America. I have been exposed to different experiences, concepts, discussions, and attempts to reach agreements for a shared future vision of a society with care at its center. This context implies a continuous actualization and rethinking of what public interventions demand from local and federal governments. Much of my work has involved supporting these exercises: checking communication campaigns to promote the distribution of unpaid care work, seeking to understand the national and international context, and preparing documents to create strategies for political advocacy. All of this is happening during a crucial moment as the upcoming presidential campaign in 2024 approaches.

In short, I have learned that collective work at different levels (regional, national, local, and community), strategic future-oriented thinking, and robust theoretical justifications are all fundamental elements when placing a topic on the human rights agenda – in the Mexico case, to ensure that care is recognized as a right at the federal level and to secure the establishment of a national care system.

I will continue to share my insights and challenges! ¡Gracias por leer!

Laura Maria Rojas

 

Human-centered design meets self-managed abortion care

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Erin Worden (NYU Wagner) | Ipas | Kenya

In my first humanitarian job, I came across a disheartening statistic that the majority of humanitarian publications available online – including the fan-favorite report – essentially go unread. Only a bleak fraction of the reports is ever clicked, let alone read and used meaningfully.

Thankfully, Ipas is taking a different approach to self-managed abortion research.

Enter human-centered design (HCD) – an iterative, innovative problem-solving process that starts and ends with the people we are designing for, pregnant women and girls in humanitarian settings who are performing their abortions.

Preparing for an HCD workshop this fall is the focus of my work with Ipas. I am working alongside a network of top-notch regional and community-based organizations in Kenya to create a multi-day, contextualized HCD workshop. The workshop will involve activities, visuals, and conversations that will enable community participants, from refugee women to local NGO workers, to generate an output that uniquely solves abortion information and access challenges in Kakuma.

The output, whatever it may be, will be uniquely tailored to the specific challenge abortion seekers are facing. This is the great purpose and potential of HCD in sexual and reproductive health and rights programming.

First Week at Bellevue Hospital

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Olivia Krivitsky (NYU Gallatin) | Bellevue Hospital – Program for Survivors of Torture (PSOT)| NYC, United States

For my second blog post, I am going to tell you a little more about my work and interest as well as the organization I am working for. I am based in New York City and love it here, especially in the summer!

I work under the supervision of Dr. Keller at the Program for Survivors of Torture, an organization that works extensively to provide care and legal aid for survivors of torture and asylum seekers. Through shadowing Dr. Keller and interacting with patients, I have had the opportunity to observe a very important sector of medicine and the responsibility that physicians have in advocating for their patients’ human rights.

During my time at this organization, many of the patients that Dr. Keller and I have interacted with expressed their inability to cook due to the lack of accessibility to a kitchen and a cooking space. Hence, I have been working to find a kitchen that would make this a possibility.  Additionally, I have been learning about the intersection between law, policy, and medicine. Gaining this toolset is pivotal when entering the human rights sector! 

Feel free to reach out with any questions!

Introduction: Yassmine Hussein

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Yassmine Hussein (NYU Gallatin) |Cairo 52| Cairo, Egypt

My name is Yassmine Hussein, and during this summer of 2023, I will be interning at Cairo52, a research institute that caters to the simplification of legal materials and policy to enable its mainstream consumption and understanding by the Egyptian population. Cairo52 attempts to connect this reproduced simplified legal material that they create to the basic concepts of human rights. Among the populations that Cairo52 work with to promote their basic human rights are sex workers, specifically in Egypt. 

While in some countries there are legal pleas to address the harsh laws and policies directed at sex workers, Egypt faces an even more dire situation, sex workers are not even treated according to the law and constitution of Egypt, in contrast, sex workers in Egypt are treated as second class citizens, invisible to the state allowing atrocities and ill-treatment to be directed towards them. 

This summer my aim is to support Cairo52 in their work addressing the visibility of sex workers and other at-risk populations in Egypt while communicating the laws and policies that are already in place to them as well as to the larger Egyptian communities in a more accessible manner. 

First Week at NACDL

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Santana Kavanaugh (NYU Gallatin) |National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers| NYC, United States

Hello Everyone, 

I write amidst a difficult time. It has been exactly a week since I started my internship with the National Association of Defense Lawyers, and while I’m enjoying my time in Washington, D.C., it was also a week ago that I lost a close family member. I hold a great deal of responsibility within my family because I am a first-generation student and the eldest of five. In all honesty, it is my family that motivated me to open the doors that I walk through today, and so not being able to support them in person has been perplexing, to say the least. Although recent days have been tough, I have hope in the days ahead. Interestingly enough, this situation has, in a way, brought me more motivation for this project. As I video call my family each day, I am reminded of the reason why I’m here.

On a more positive note,

I was a bit nervous about working for NACDL mostly because of how professional and educated the staff is. I’d like to think that I have these traits as well, but as a young person, there is always an assumption that I am lacking in these areas—well, I haven’t received any complaints yet. I think they like me!

Currently, I’m working on one of NACDL’s racial justice initiatives called “50 Years of Mass Incarceration,” which is a project aimed at educating people on the history of mass incarceration and the current local and federal policy efforts to end the exponentially growing rate of incarcerated individuals in the United States. Furthermore, I’ve been doing research with NACDL’s Fourth Amendment Department to learn about the way that technology produces racial injustice within the legal system. I look forward to learning more about the way race impacts our criminal justice system.

 I am very grateful for this experience, and even given the circumstances, I know that I belong in the space that I’m in. 

Thank you for reading.

-S.K

First Week At WOREC

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Puja Thapa (NYU College of Arts and Sciences)| Women’s Rehabilitation Center (WOREC) | Kathmandu, Nepal

My Global Human Rights Fellowship started at the Dubai International Airport during my transit between the United States and Nepal. While dragging my bags anxiously to make it to the next plane on time, I saw, heard, and interacted with Nepali workers at the airport. The short time at the airport gave me a glance at the migration industry in the Gulf, where estimated hundreds of thousands of Nepali migrant workers work. This experience made me even more eager to work and learn in this field. 

I started my work at Women Rehabilitation Center (WOREC) Nepal on June 12, and it has been great so far, understanding the scale of its reach and work throughout the nation. The organization has around 30+ staff, primarily women, who have made it a welcoming space for me. The organization is busy with training and projects, including the UNICEF refugee program. Sharing my office with two case officers, I have learned about WOREC’s substantial impact on women’s lives through legal assistance and the staff’s commitment to their work. Talking about my work so far, I have been busy studying the organization’s annual reports to grasp better what WOREC does. I will be shortly traveling to Udayapur and Morang districts in Nepal, where I will be able to understand community engagement and local women’s networks. I look forward to the field trip, as it will be crucial to my internship responsibilities of preparing an assessment report, research article, and policy brief. Additionally, it will benefit my independent research for my thesis next year. 

Overall, through my involvement with WOREC and my assessment of Nepal after four years of visits, I have understood how internal and international migration has been an inseparable part of the daily lives of Nepal. News outlets and community members verify that there has been a massive surge of migration abroad and migration from rural to urban places in Nepal, especially after the COVID pandemic. I cannot wait to immerse myself more in the community to reveal more findings regarding migration, especially women’s labor migration.