A message from our Director, Angelina Godoy Dear friends, For the first time in history, eleven survivors of the El Mozote massacre have been summoned to give testimony in a Salvadoran courtroom in the reopened case against former members of the military high command. The stakes couldn’t be higher: these are elderly men and women who

Ferguson, ’89, became famous overnight when his office beat the president in court. STORY BY QUINN RUSSELL BROWN FOR COLUMNS MAGAZINE, MAY 6, 2017 Bob Ferguson landed on the front page of newspapers across America thanks to Donald Trump. But Donald Trump wasn’t thanking Bob Ferguson. Washington’s attorney general sued the president over the first

Like many students who have the opportunity to travel abroad, Susan Sygall’s year as an exchange student at the University of Queensland in Australia during 1975 was one of the defining experiences of her life. She went camping in the Outback, hitch-hiked across New Zealand, and bussed through Southeast Asia. As a wheelchair-rider and advocate

As scholars at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, we believe research, teaching, and engagement with human rights is today more urgent than ever, yet we are gravely concerned about the future of our enterprise. We are committed to conducting research using the tools of our disciplines – from the social and natural sciences

As part of the Unfinished Sentences project, UWCHR Director Angelina Snodgrass Godoy accompanied a recent delegation to El Salvador, which resulted in a commitment by the government of El Salvador to form a national commission to search for people disappeared during the armed conflict. Read the following report from the delegation by the Due Process of Law

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

As an instructor, mentor, and advocate, Jamie Mayerfeld is a linchpin of the human rights community at the University of Washington. He is a Professor in the Political Science Department, an Adjunct Professor of Law, Societies, and Justice, and a faculty associate of the Center for Human Rights. His most recent book, published earlier this

Letter from the Director Dear friends, This Annual Report goes to press at a challenging time for those of us who care about human rights. Personally, I’m still struggling to come to terms with the rising signs of intolerance in this country and around the world, and the human rights implications of some policies promoted