Elica Vafaie, Daniel Marsh to Speak at UC Human Rights Fellows Conference

Elica Vafaie '11 and Daniel Marsh '12, winners of the 2010 UC Human Rights Fellowship competition, will present their fellowship projects at the UC Human Rights Fellows Conference at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley on November 4.

Vafaie worked with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) to assist with their International Human Rights and Guantánamo docket.  She helped with litigation to hold corporations accountable for their international wrong-doing in domestic courts, utilization of the Alien Torts Statute to ban private military contractors, and efforts to close the Guantánamo detention center.  Her project also included the production of educational materials for use by CCR's Education and Outreach Department.

Marsh worked in a rural paralegal office in Sierra Leone to promote access to justice services by serving individual clients and addressing community-level problems. The formal justice system in Sierra Leone is  effectively inaccessible to rural communities, and as a result, most individuals in rural areas rely on customary law, comprised of ethnic customary norms, for dispute resolution. Marsh assisted the development of rule of law through training paralegals in formal concepts of the law and overseeing mediation between disputing parties.

UC Human Rights Fellows Conference

2010 UC Human Rights Fellows

Primary Category

Tags