Human Rights 2026: Current Challenges & Strategies

Valerie R. Anderson 

is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and a community psychologist (Ph.D., Michigan State, 2015). She conducts interdisciplinary, community-engaged research on system responses to youth offending and victimization, especially where these intersect, with emphases on system-involved youth and responses; and victimization and trauma with a focus human trafficking. Using multi-level, mixed-method approaches and partnerships with community agencies, her work appears in leading criminology, public health, and psychology journals. She has led several externally funded grants and earned national recognition for her research and teaching. Areas of specialization include feminist criminology, and youth and adolescence.

Mary Lynne Birck  

is judge of the Court of Common Pleas, Domestic Relations Division of Clermont County, Ohio. Judge Birck has received recognition from the Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati for creation of a holistic court; and Child Focus, for expanding services for adults and children at the court. Prior to her appointment to the bench in December 2020, she served Clermont County as an assistant prosecuting attorney in the Civil Division. As an assistant prosecutor, she was named Community Leader of the Year by the Clermont County Board of Developmental Disabilities. Birck is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the University of Cincinnati College of Law. While in law school, Judge Birck was an Arthur Russell Morgan fellow with the Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights, managing editor of the Human Rights Quarterly, and student articles editor for University of Cincinnati Law Review. Prior to attending law school, she taught at her alma mater, Saint Ursula Academy in Cincinnati.

Catherine Filloux

is an award-winning French Algerian American playwright and librettist who has been writing plays and operas about human rights for many decades. Filloux’s over thirty plays and libretti have been produced in the U.S., internationally, and are widely published, anthologized, and written about. Catherine has traveled for her plays to conflict areas including Bosnia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Haiti, Iraq, Northern Ireland; and to Sudan and South Sudan on an overseas reading tour with the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. She received her French Baccalaureate in philosophy with honors in Toulon, France, and her MFA at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Dramatic Writing. Catherine is featured in the documentary film Acting Together on the World Stage. You can read more about her and write to her here: www.catherinefilloux.com.

Lauren Gray

is a senior strategic communications consultant and VP of Communications and Public Affairs at the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, a nearly fifty-year-old civil rights legal organization leading seven lawsuits against anti-LGBTQ Trump executive orders. She has nearly twenty years of experience and graduated from the University of Cincinnati College of Law, where she worked on the editorial staff for the Human Rights Quarterly at the Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights. Previously, she served as senior vice president at Edelman, one of the largest, leading global PR firms. There she advised CEOs and Fortune 500 companies how to navigate complex reputational and societal issues, including LGBTQ+ equality and landmark Supreme Court decisions, such as the overturn of Roe v. Wade and affirmative action in college admissions. At Edelman, she also served for three years as the global client lead for the firm’s work with UNFPA, the United Nations agency focused on sexual and reproductive health and rights and presented on behalf of Edelman to the heads of 150 country offices at the 2024 United Nationals Population Fund (UNFPA) global leadership meeting in Kazakhstan.

Haider Ala Hamoudi 

became dean of the University of Cincinnati Donald P. Klekamp College of Law in 2023, leading significant growth and transformation. Applications and enrollment have risen; and new online certificates and concentrations have been added. The college launched a comprehensive academic success and wellness program resulting in top bar passage and employment rates among Ohio law schools. Curricular reforms include a mandatory first-year client-centered practice course, a first-year elective, and enhanced writing requirements. Live experiential learning opportunities have expanded and the externship program has been revitalized. The college’s existing centers of excellence have risen to a new level of prominence; and engagement with the practicing bar, alumni, and community partners have deepened. An award-winning teacher and leading scholar of Middle Eastern and Islamic law, Hamoudi is editor-in-chief of Arab Law Quarterly and previously served in leadership roles at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, as well as appointments at The University of Utah, William & Mary, and Columbia Law School (where he earned his JD and JSD). A proud Muslim and vegan, he prioritizes faith, family, and wellness.

Dina Francesca Haynes

is executive director of the Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights and a research scholar at Yale Law School. A leading expert on migration, refugees, gender, and transitional justice, she has lived and worked as an international human rights lawyer in many countries, for multiple UN agencies and as the head of the human rights department for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia and Montenegro. She also founded her own nonprofit in response to gaps in refugee protection and attacks on migrant and human rights defenders around the world. She holds a BA from the University of Denver; a JD from the University of Cincinnati, where she was an Arthur Russell Morgan Fellow with the Urban Morgan Institute; and an LLM from Georgetown Law. She has advised governments and contributed amicus briefs to top courts, including the US Supreme Court.

Harold Hongju Koh

is Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and a leading U.S. authority on international law, national security, and human rights. A member of the Yale faculty since 1985, he served as dean from 2004–2009, and as the 22nd Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State from 2009–2013, receiving the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award. He returned to that office as Senior Adviser (senior political appointee in 2021). From 1998-2001, he served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Koh has authored or co-authored ten books and more than 200 articles; frequently testified before Congress; and litigated major international law cases in U.S. and international tribunals, including on behalf of Ukraine and the world’s labor unions before the International Court of Justice. He holds eighteen honorary degrees and over thirty human rights awards; and is a Fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun and Judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit before joining Yale; and worked in private practice and as an adviser for the U.S. Department of Justice.

Bert Berkley Lockwood

Distinguished Service Professor and director of the UMI, has been involved in international human rights for more than forty years. Bert Lockwood has been editor-in-chief of the Human Rights Quarterly (HRQ), a multidisciplinary academic journal published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, since 1982. HRQ is widely acknowledged to be the leading journal in the field. In addition, he has been series editor of the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights book series, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, since 1988. In addition to these and many other achievements, he has the privilege to work on behalf of human rights with the many talented students who have chosen to study at the University of Cincinnati Donald P. Klekamp College of Law and to be involved with the UMI.

Bradford C. Mank 

specializes in environmental and administrative law, with extensive scholarship on environmental justice, regulatory reform, standing, and statutory interpretation. He has advised the City of Cincinnati on climate change, environmental justice, recycling, and air pollution issues. Named the James B. Helmer, Jr. Professor of Law in 2001, he has received the Harold C. Schott Scholarship Award, Goldman Prize for Excellence in Teaching, and the Dean’s Faculty Excellence Award. A former Connecticut Assistant Attorney General and law firm associate, he holds a BA from Harvard and a JD from Yale, where he edited the Yale Law Journal.

Satang Nabaneh

LL.D., Ph.D., holds the Judge John Meagher Endowed Professorship in Transitional Justice and Human Rights at the University of Dayton's Human Rights Center, where she serves as Director of Transitional Justice Initiatives. She is assistant professor of political science and research professor of law. An award-winning Gambian legal scholar and human rights practitioner, she is a member of the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC) & Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Children. Editor of Female Genital Mutilation in Africa: Politics of Criminalisation (Pretoria University Law Press, 2025), her work has been featured in The New York Times, Reuters, and Time. Her honors include the 2025 Women Have Wings Award and recognition among New African’s “100 Most Influential Young Africans.”

Heather Russell

is a 1980 graduate of Miami University of Ohio with cum laude degrees in French and international studies. She was Hamilton County Assistant Prosecutor from 1984 to 2002 where she was the first female team leader in major felonies, and was later Chief of Grand Jury. Her expertise was adult and child sexual abuse, domestic violence, and homicide. In 2002, she was elected to the Hamilton County Municipal Court where she served four consecutive terms of six years. She served on the Ohio Supreme Court’s Advisory Committee on Domestic Violence; presided over a Mental Health Court docket; and created and presided over a Human Trafficking docket. She has received awards from the Cincinnati Bar Association, Ohio Crime Victims, and the University of Cincinnati College of Law Alumni Association's Distinguished Law Alumna Award. She retired in 2025.

Ryan Thoreson

is an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Law and deputy editor of the Human Rights Quarterly. Formerly a researcher in the LGBT Rights program at Human Rights Watch, he has taught human rights at Yale Law School and the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Transnational LGBT Activism: Working for Sexual Rights Worldwide (University of Minnesota), and coeditor of The SAGE Handbook of Global Sexualities (Sage), with widely published scholarship. He holds a JD from Yale Law School, a DPhil from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and an AB in government and studies of women, gender, and sexuality from Harvard University.

Steven M. Watt 

is senior counsel with the Human Rights Program of the ACLU, specializing in litigation before federal courts and international tribunals. Steven was counsel in litigation challenging the U.S. extraordinary rendition, arbitrary detention and torture program, El Masri v. Tenet, Mohamed v. Jeppesen, Ali v. Rumsfeld, and Salim v. Mitchell. More recently, Steven is counsel in two admiralty cases challenging the U.S. Coast Guard's abusive detention practices, Weir v. United States, and the U.S. military's extrajudicial killings on the high seas, Burnley v. United States. Before joining the ACLU in 2004, Steven was a human rights fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he focused on post-9/11 litigation, including Rasul v. Bush (Guantanamo detentions), Arar v. Ashcroft, (U.S. extraordinary rendition and torture); and Turkmen v. Ashcroft, (U.S arbitrary detention and abuse of immigrants). Before beginning his legal career in the United States, Steven worked for three years as a public defender and legal policy consultant for the Solomon Islands government, managed refugee camps in Tanzania, established a community-based development HIV/AIDS program in Uganda, and managed emergency programs for the internally displaced in Liberia.