During the spring semester, second-year law student Madeleine Kim ’25 spent hours poring over reports about the Nepali Civil War, which lasted a decade starting in the mid-1990s. She dug into the nuances of Nepali law, researched legislative reforms that happened in the aftermath of the war, and studied their impact on women and the LGBTIQ+ community.
At the end of the semester, along with two other students, Kim presented their findings to U.N. Women, which will eventually publish them in a larger report on transitional justice. It was all part of a unique partnership between UN Women and the Law School’s Human Rights Center.
For the students, it was an unforgettable experience.
“Coming into law school, international law was something that I wanted to focus on,” said Kim, who chose the University of Minnesota for its international law faculty and the Human Rights Center, one of the first in the country. “Having this experience gave me much more insight into the path that would allow me to end up working at the U.N. someday.”
The project was made possible thanks to law school alum Megan Manion ‘16, who turned out to be a great role model for students like Kim. Manion returned to her alma mater and the Human Rights Center in 2020 as senior legal advisor to Minnesota law professor and former UN special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights Fionnuala Ní Aoláin. Manion spent most of her time serving in this role, but she also made time to teach a class on women’s human rights and facilitated the Human Rights Center’s externship program with UN Women. Prior to returning to the Law School, Manion worked for U.N. Women for four years in the field in Afghanistan and at U.N. Headquarters in New York.
The U.N. Women project at the Law School began in 2022, with two different projects related to international law and transitional justice. In the first project, students in U.N. human rights investigations have addressed violations related to sexual orientation and gender identity. Based on their analysis, they offered recommendations to further promote and protect LGBTIQ+ rights in future investigations.
“This was cutting-edge research,” Manion said. “There hadn’t been this type of fulsome qualitative and quantitative or legal analysis that brought together all of these findings related to the rights of individuals with diverse sexual orientation or gender identities.”
Students also had a chance to bolster their research, including by conducting stakeholder interviews with an investigator for an active Commission of Inquiry.
In choosing the second project, Manion and her colleagues at U.N. Women put their heads together to come up with a project that would support the organization to maximize country-specific case studies in their upcoming publication on transitional justice. They settled on Nepal.
“The students got a view of what doing UN-level research looks like, reviewing U.N. documents, taking a historical view of some of those legal questions, including how the U.N. responds to conflict, and utilizing Nepali domestic law looking at legal and policy reform in the wake of conflict,” Manion said.
Third-year law student Katin Liphart Massad ‘25 was part of the spring project. Along with her law degree, she is also earning a master’s degree in public policy at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Working on a project like this with Manion was a dream come true for her as she plans to work in international human rights with a focus on security and policy.
“It was cool to get to work with Megan,” Liphart Massad said. “She did a great job of steering us in the right direction without taking over. Her feedback and the way she led the project made us learn more than we might have otherwise. Someday I would love to have a career like hers to look back on.” This summer, Liphart Massad was selected for a competitive summer fellowship through the Human Rights Center to work full-time with Charity & Security Network, a renowned organization working on these issues.
Manion recently wrapped up her time with the Human Rights Center when Professor Ní Aoláin’s term at the UN ended and the new special rapporteur started. Next, Manion is headed to Yale Law School to serve as research and advocacy director with the Global Gender Equality Project of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and senior legal advisor with the U.N. Working Group on ending discrimination against women and girls.
With Manion’s departure, the project with U.N. Women is ending too, but its impact on the human rights community will last. The Human Rights Center regularly partners with a wide range of external organizations to make critical contributions to important human rights aims while offering our students privileged and transformative hands-on training opportunities. The Human Rights Center will have a new agenda of projects for the coming year, including other U.N. mechanisms as well as local, national, and international human rights organizations and networks.
“The international human rights community recognizes Minnesota as a leading place for human rights research and teaching,” said Amanda Lyons ‘09, executive director of the Human Rights Center. “Minnesota has had this reputation on the global stage for a long time. These kinds of mutually beneficial partnerships give international bodies and our counterparts in other countries the chance to see Minnesota as an ally for human rights movements, as a place where great research is getting done with top students.”