Letter from the Director Most readers of this annual report already know it’s been a rough year for both higher education and human rights. Our Center for Human Rights sits at the nexus of these two fields, so we’ve been in the thick of it. While I don’t know what our work will look like

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 2024 we continued to monitor conditions at the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma, documenting emergent crises affecting people detained at the NWDC, including the death of Charles Leo Daniel and a series of suicide attempts at the facility during the first quarter of the year. In both cases, these crises were first reported

Over the past year, the Strategies for Massage Parlor Workers’ Rights project has experienced huge strides in connecting students, faculty, staff, and the larger UW research community to the Seattle region’s mostly unlicensed Asian immigrant massage workers.  Deepening collaborative research practices that  began in 2022–2023, this project, led by Massage Parlor Outreach Project in collaboration

  This year we embarked on a new collaboration between immigrant rights group La Resistencia, UWCHR, and Hinton Publishing to showcase the stories of people in deportation proceedings in Washington State. A team of 17 students worked to gather the stories of people facing deportation through Boeing Field (and in some cases, folks already deported).

The 2023–24 academic year brought new opportunities and deepened relationships among the Indigenous Rights and Environmental Sustainability project’s students, faculty, and community partners. During the summer and fall of 2023, we brought two new University of Washington School of Marine and Environmental Affairs (UW SMEA) graduate students onto the project: Thor Belle and Kayley Pingeon.

Letter from the Director Fifteen years! It’s hard to believe. As I write these words, planning is underway for the celebration of our Center for Human Rights’ fifteen-year anniversary, and I find myself reflecting on all the changes this decade and a half has brought. In some ways, our Center still feels “new”—we’re still small,

We sat down with the three student researchers behind “Abuses in the Air” to ask them about their experiences working on this report.  Here’s what they had to say:   Andrea Marcos: Can you tell us how the “Abuses in the Air” report started out? Trevor Helmy: It started with someone reaching out to the

Letter from the Director Lately I’ve been contemplating history as cyclical rather than linear. In part this is because I’ve found myself frustrated by the fits and starts of teaching during Covid-19. (We’re on Zoom! Now we’re in person! Now back on Zoom!) We are all eager to leave the pandemic behind, yet it lingers, transforms, resurfaces.

Letter from the Director As a professor and a parent soldiering through the third year of schooling upended by pandemic conditions, it’s sometimes hard to be upbeat. My eight-year-old recently said she doesn’t want to join the rest of the family at the dinner table because all we ever talk about is “the destruction of