News

Roma Patel, who is on track to receive both a J.D. and a Master of Public Health degree from the University of Minnesota in 2015, has won a Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation CoDE Award. She will receive $50,000 in funding, access to Mayo's enormous resources, and the services of a production team, and over the coming year she will create a video series intended to use the power of storytelling to help patients from diverse backgrounds better understand their illnesses and their health-care options.

The International Fellowship Programs at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and the Human Rights Center at the University of Minnesota Law School express their sincere condolences to the family and friends of Senior Counsel Dana Seetahal of Trinidad and Tobago. On May 4, Seetahal was gunned down while driving in the vicinity of the Woodbrook Youth Club in Port of Spain, Trinidad, the victim of an apparent political assassination.

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.