This Thursday will mark the beginning of the eighth annual Northwestern University Conference on Human Rights, which will be focused this year on the struggles of forced migration.
NUCHR is the nation’s largest undergraduate student-organized and student-attended conference on human rights, according to the organization’s website.
The conference spans three days and will open with a lecture from humanitarian and former Congolese refugee Rose Mapendo. Mapendo created Mapendo New Horizons, a nonprofit organization committed to educating the global community about the effects of conflict on women and children. The lecture will be held in the Ryan Family Auditorium at 8 p.m.
The rest of the event is dedicated to four panel discussions and a closing keynote address from Barbara Harrell-Bond, the founder of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford. The panels will cover topics including the following: how definitions influence the rights that are allotted to displaced people; the psychological effects refugees endure; the role of nongovernmental and international organizations in refugee resettlement; and the implications of expanding the legal definition of “refugee” to include economic migrants.
Conference co-director Julie Kornfeld sees forced migration as an issue of great importance.
“It’s a problem that has always been here and is not going away because of its systemic roots,” the SESP senior said. “Stateless people are void of international human rights because there is no sovereign entity to protect those rights.”
Stateless people are usually forced to leave their homes because of internal conflicts within the state, natural disasters or developments.
After living in refugee camps, they either move back to their homeland or resettle in another country.
“They face the problems of having to leave their home country, they face lack of education and health care opportunities and they have no freedom of movement,” said Katharine Nasielski, the organization’s co-director and a Weinberg senior. Nasielski said refugees are unwanted by three countries: their home country, the country where they resettle and the country that houses their refugee camps.
NUCHR will invite 41 delegates to the conference, three of which are students at NU. The others include students from other universities such as the University of Chicago and Stanford University.
One NU delegate, Weinberg senior Lindsey Henrikson, said she was inspired to apply for a conference delegate position after taking human rights classes at her study abroad location, the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. She said she was also interested in working on current refugee cases after working on cases for a publication of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
A benefit of the conference “is to facilitate discussion, for all of us to have an open forum to discuss human rights,” Henrikson said. “We can go back to our universities with a better understanding of how to deal with these issues in the future.”
For both co-directors, the goal of this conference is to inform NU students about human rights abuses and to critically analyze and solve these issues.
“Our goal is to have the audience look at an international issue through a human rights perspective, to understand the definitions, histories and complications of forced migration and how it affects the whole international community,” Kornfeld said.
