In 1993, the UN Truth Commission for El Salvador estimated that some 10,000 Salvadoran civilians were forcibly disappeared during the country’s armed conflict. To this day, no meaningful inquiries have been launched to recover their remains or identify those responsible for these crimes. In El Salvador, relatives of the disappeared have been demanding justice for

The 2015–2016 academic year was a busy one for the Rethinking Punishment project, a UWCHR-supported initiative combining teaching, research, and public advocacy to promote human rights-focused approaches to problems of violence and mass incarceration. An ambitious agenda, and one that is setting the stage for new projects that could change the way that Washington State

I had the pleasure of working with Patrick Ball at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group office in San Francisco during the summer of 2016. This training proved indispensable as I worked to process and publish a number of datasets on human rights violations during the El Salvador Civil War as part of a collaboration between

In recent years, scholars and social movements have brought the issue of mass incarceration into public consciousness in the United States. Many now know that the U.S. has the world’s largest prison population, or have heard alarming figures, like an incarceration rate for Black men that is 6 times that for white men. At the

A message from UWCHR Director, Prof. Angelina Snodgrass Godoy Dear friends, With UW’s fall quarter now underway, our offices at the Center for Human Rights are once again abuzz with activity. We’ve spent the past few weeks laying out plans for the year ahead, training our new undergraduate researchers, and welcoming back our seasoned grad

This past summer I conducted nearly 40 in-depth interviews in Israel with asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan. I study the political organizing of migrants who are without permanent legal status, comparing between mobilization efforts led by African migrants in Israel with similar endeavors led by Latino migrants in the state of Washington. Thanks to

Professor Katherine Beckett, UWCHR Steering Committee member and faculty in the Departments of Sociology and Law, Societies, and Justice, has published a piece in The American Prospect, titled “Violence, Mass Incarceration, and the Myth of Monstrosity.” The article draws on work related to the Rethinking Punishment initiative, led by Prof. Beckett and Prof. Steve Herbert. Prof. Beckett

On August 15, 2016, United States Congressional Representatives Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Norma Torres of California delivered a letter to President Barack Obama, signed by 26 Members of Congress, calling for the declassification of U.S. military and intelligence files relating to forced disappearances and human rights abuses during the Salvadoran civil war. Additionally, Representatives