Human Rights Law
Law School probably isn't the first place you'd look for engaged scholarship in higher education, but the University of Minnesota Law School has several Centers that exemplify remarkably high and innovative standards of public engagement. In this blog we'll take a look at the Human Rights Center and its associated Human Rights Library and Resource Center. We'll subsequently consider the Consortium on Law and Values and the Center on Race & Poverty.
The Human Rights Center helps human rights advocates, monitors, students, educators, and volunteers to access effective tools, practices, and networks in order to promote a culture of human rights and responsibilities in local, national, and international communities.The Center was inaugurated December 1988 on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its principal focus is to help train effective human rights professionals and volunteers through
- Applied human rights research
- Educational tools
- Field and training opportunities
- Human rights on-line
- Learning communities and partnerships
Perhaps the key resource of the Center is the University of Minnesota Human Rights Library, which houses one of the world's largest collections of more than fourteen thousand core human rights documents, including several hundred human rights treaties and other primary international human rights instruments. The site also provides access to more than four thousands links and a unique search device for multiple human rights sites. This comprehensive research tool is accessed each month by more than 175,000 students, scholars, educators, and human rights advocates from over 135 countries around the world. Documents are available in six languages - Arabic, English, French, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish.
The Human Rights Resource Center is an integral part of the Human Rights Center and works in partnership with the Human Rights Library to
- Create and distribute Human Rights Education resources via electronic and print media;
- Train activists, professionals, and students as human rights educators;
- Build advocacy networks to encourage effective practices in human rights education;
- Support the World Programme for Human Rights Education (2005-2007) and the United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education (1995-2004).
It is noteworthy that the Center's Director, Law Prof. David Weissbrodt, has been named Regents Professor, the highest level of recognition given to faculty at the University of Minnesota.