Transnational Justice Initiatives – Advancing new ways of thinking about law and legal institutions to create more just futures.

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CURRENT INITIATIVE

Climate Justice, Racial Justice & Regional Human Rights Systems

The global ecological crisis is a racial justice crisis, and a crisis of historic colonial injustice. Our work on Climate Justice, Racial Justice & Regional Human Rights Systems brings anti-colonial and racial justice to the center of legal, policy, and academic work to combat environmental degradation, climate change, and related displacement. We are striving to disrupt the silos that prevent meaningful trans-national collaboration across movements for racial, climate, and migrant justice. This initiative is directed by S. Priya Morley, who has been based at the Bernstein Institute for Human Rights at NYU Law since 2024.

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PAST INITIATIVE

Race & Human Rights Reimagined Initiative

The Race & Human Rights Reimagined Initiative is a resource for students, practitioners, and scholars interested in thinking critically about race and human rights. While active, the initiative sought to bring together expertise in human rights, Critical Race Theory and Third World Approaches to International Law, and to uncover how race and empire operate within the international human rights system. We also explored the potential of law to dismantle national and trans-national structures of racial and colonial subordination.

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PAST INITIATIVE

UN Anti Racism Mandate

Globally millions of people continue to be the victims of racism, racial discrimination, anti-Seminitism, xenophobia, and related intolerance. The UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance monitors the contemporary and evolving forms of these injustices. Prof. E. Tendayi Achiume served in this position from 2017-2022, and the mandate was housed at the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA Law.

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Featured Report

Setting Institutional Priorities on Climate Reparations & Racial Justice: Learning from Social Movements

In March 2023, we brought together a working group of experts from the United Nations and Inter-American human rights systems and regional social movements to discuss the disproportionate impacts of the global climate crisis on racially marginalized peoples in North America, Central America, and the Caribbean – particularly people of African and Indigenous descent. This convening “Setting Institutional Priorities on Climate Reparations and Racial Justice: Learning from Social Movements” was held at UCLA Law.

In particular, the Convening sought to engage the growing claims for climate reparations arising from social movements and nations in the Global South, exploring options for climate reparations under international law, the international human rights framework and the institutional mechanisms of the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Setting Institutional Priorities on Climate Reparations & Racial Justice: Learning from Social Movements

Explore our resources

Amicus Brief Submitted to IACtHR for its Advisory Opinion on the Climate Emergency and Human Rights (2023)

Bay Kou Bliye, Pote Mak Sonje: Climate Injustice in Haiti and the Case for Reparations (2024)

Trans-National Re-Imaginings

Ecological Crisis, Climate Justice & Racial Justice