The University of Minnesota has received a $1.25 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through Higher Education for Development (HED), to create a human rights law school partnership between the university and four law schools in Medellin, Colombia, to strengthen the capacities of the Medellin schools to teach, research and provide clinical legal representation toward the promotion of international human rights and the rule of law.

A university professor who fled imprisonment and torture in his native Ethiopia was recently granted asylum in the United States. The Law School's Immigration and Human Rights Law Clinic represented and guided him through the asylum process.

University of Minnesota human rights advocates traveled to U.N. headquarters in New York in March 2012 to attend and testify at the 104th session of the U.N. Human Rights Committee.

On Feb. 28, 2012, students in the Law School's Human Rights Litigation and International Legal Advocacy Clinic will be in Washington, D.C., to observe the oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in the controversial case of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum. Prof. Jennifer Green, who heads the Clinic, is also traveling with her students to watch the oral argument and assist the plaintiffs' lawyers in responding to media coverage of the case.

In the fall 2011 issue of With Equal Right, Erin Furlong ('05) shares her experiences and the advantages of obtaining a joint J.D. and M.P.H. degree through the Law School's Joint Degree Program in Law, Health, & the Life Sciences.

"During my 1L year, I occasionally wondered what I was going to do with some of the 'core' courses when I started practice," Furlong says in her essay. "But as soon as I started work on my master's degree, I started to see the connections."

Earlier this month, students and faculty working at the University of Minnesota Law School's Immigration and Human Rights Clinic helped a West African man, who prefers to remain anonymous, secure asylum in the United States. After being arrested, starved, beaten, tortured, and sexually humiliated by government soldiers for his political beliefs, the man risked his life to escape imprisonment and travel to the United States.

The Law School's clinics can make remarkable changes in the lives of their clients, perhaps none more dramatically than the Immigration and Human Rights Law Clinic. The student attorneys in the Immigration Clinic represent refugees who are fleeing persecution in their native countries and seeking asylum in the United States.

Claudia Ochoa ('12) says she didn't know what to expect when she started at the Immigration Clinic last fall. But soon she was part of a team doing interviews and investigations on behalf of a woman from Ethiopia seeking safe haven after a long trip to safety.

The Human Rights Center at the University of Minnesota Law School and the Oslo Center for Peace and Human Rights in partnership with the Somali Institute for Peace Research are co-sponsoring "Rebuilding Somalia: The Role of the Diaspora" on Saturday, September 24, 2011. The forum will be held in Room 25 of Mondale Hall, 229 19th Ave. S., Minneapolis, from 2:00-4:30 p.m.

An amicus curiae brief drafted by the Law School's Human Rights Litigation and International Legal Advocacy Clinic was cited by two circuit judges in a recent oral argument before the U.S. Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia. Prof. Fionnuala Ní Aoláin signed the brief, which was drafted by Prof. Jennifer Green as Counsel of Record and by student attorneys Astrid Brouillard ('12), Anne Fuchs ('12), James C. Horvath ('12), Melissa Muro Lamere ('12), Nathaniel Nesbitt ('11), Feras Sleiman ('12), and Leo Twiggs ('11).

Students and faculty working at the University of Minnesota's Immigration and Human Rights Law Clinic have secured asylum for another client fleeing political persecution, the third time in recent months that the Clinic's efforts have enabled a person fleeing danger abroad to remain in the United States.