Center’s seventh FOIA lawsuit would compel proactive release of three key types of documents on a quarterly basis On November 13, 2024, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), seeking to require

Letter from the Director Dear Friends, I’d like to think of this annual report as something like a time capsule. It recounts the activities our Center for Human Rights conducted in our fifteenth year. Having helmed our center since those early days when our existence was a bit more, shall we say, aspirational than actual,

In 2023–24, UWCHR supported multiple scholars who came to UW after fleeing violence in their home countries. These included Mahir Hazim, who shares his experience as an Afghan legal scholar in the interview below. Mahir Hazim is an acting assistant professor of law at the University of Washington School of Law. Previously he was a

Funds from the Lisa Sable Brown award have supported research for my dissertation, “Nascent Moves: Loss, Desire, and In/Visible LGBTQ Resistances in Bangladesh,” which argues that to understand queerness in postcolonial global south modernities, we need to employ the lens of kotipona. Kotipona is a way of life and refers to being flamboyant and having

On the 35th anniversary of the FENASTRAS bombing, UWCHR revisits case Thirty-five years after the deadly October 31, 1989 bombing at the headquarters of the FENASTRAS union federation in San Salvador, researchers at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights have continued their search for information pertaining to this attack, which has never been

In spring of 2024, Marissa Olivares Morales, recipient of UWCHR’s Benjamin Linder Endowed Fund, joined UWCHR’s Andrea Marcos for an interview exploring her relationship to human rights work, from Nicaragua to Seattle, Washington. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Andrea: Thank you so much for taking time to talk with us about

This report is part of the University of Washington Center for Human Rights’ Immigrant Rights Observatory project, using public records research and community partnerships to monitor implementation of and compliance with state laws protecting immigrant rights. For more on the project and other publications, visit the project page here. Introduction As the United States enters

In 2019, the Washington state legislature passed a landmark “sanctuary” law aimed at safeguarding immigrant rights, the Keep Washington Working Act (KWW).[1] In doing so, it prohibits many once-routine practices that, in the past, funneled many Washington state residents into contact with federal immigration enforcement. While many migrant justice organizations worked hard to secure the

By Anu Taranath   In March with support from UWCHR, my co-director Dr. Eric Opoku Agyemang and I were able to host three activists to speak with our students, one each from Ghana, India and Mexico. Our class, “Global Service Learning and the Politics of Help,” occurred in Winter Quarter 2024 and culminated in students traveling

On Thursday, May 16th, 2024, the UW Center for Human Rights hosted our annual Spring Symposium and Awards Celebration, bringing together students, faculty, organizational partners, and the UWCHR broader community to highlight the impact of UWCHR collaborations and celebrate our students. Alongside celebrating UWCHR’s 15th anniversary, this year’s event featured a storytelling project collaboration between