Human Rights 2026: Current Challenges & Strategies

Rebecca Hamilton

Professor of law at American University Washington College of Law and executive editor at Just Security. She was American University’s 2025 Scholar/Teacher of the Year, a 2024 US Fulbright Scholar, a 2020 Council on Foreign Relations fellow, and a 2019 Pulitzer Center grantee. Her current book project, White Collar War Criminals, recounts the multi-decade struggle to hold the corporate enablers of atrocities to account. A first-generation graduate of the University of Sydney and Harvard Law School, her 2011 book, Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide, examines the impact of citizen activism on policymaking in the face of unfolding atrocities. Her scholarship, published in the Yale, Harvard, and Columbia journals of international law, focuses on the structural factors underlying international crimes. Previously, Hamilton served in the prosecutorial division of the International Criminal Court. Prior to academia, she was a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post and a legal correspondent for Reuters.

Alicia Peters

Professor of anthropology and affiliated faculty in the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of New England. Her teaching interests include health and inequality; medical anthropology; ethnographic methods; and human trafficking. Professor Peters’ research explores legal responses to and survivor experiences of human trafficking in the United States. She is the author of the books, Trafficking Trajectories: Vulnerability, Failed Systems, and Case for Prevention (2025) and Responding to Human Trafficking: Sex, Gender, and Culture in the Law (2015), both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press as part of its Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series.

Harold Hongju Koh

Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and one of the leading U.S. authorities on international law, national security, and human rights. A member of the Yale faculty since 1985, he served as dean from 2004 to 2009 and as the 22nd Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State from 2009 to 2013, receiving the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award. He returned to that office as Senior Adviser in 2021. From 1998 to 2001, he served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. He has authored or co-authored ten books and more than 200 articles and has litigated major international law cases in U.S. and international tribunals.

Ryan Thoreson

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 and coeditor of The SAGE Handbook of Global Sexualities. 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.

Alex Miskho

Fellow and lecturer in law at the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. Alex previously served in the Biden-Harris administration as a senior advisor to United States Secretary of State John Kerry in the Office of the US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate. In this role, she led diplomatic efforts and interagency policy on resilience issues; and at the intersection of climate with health, migration, security, and more. Her experience on climate and environmental issues has spanned clean energy engineering, grid resilience, climate risk modelling, human rights law, diplomacy, and environmental justice. Alex was previously the interim policy director for the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy and a senior consultant at Oliver Wyman. She received her Bachelor of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her JD from Yale Law School.

Catherine Filloux

Award-winning French Algerian American playwright and librettist whose work has focused on human rights for decades. Her more than thirty plays and libretti have been produced in the United States and internationally, and are widely published and anthologized. She has traveled to conflict areas including Bosnia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Haiti, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Sudan, and South Sudan in connection with her work. She earned her French Baccalaureate in philosophy with honors in Toulon, France, and her MFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Dramatic Writing. She is also featured in the documentary Acting Together on the World Stage.

Tara Van Ho

Associate professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law and a leading expert in international law and its sub-fields of business and human rights, and international investment law. A former corporate lawyer and frequent UN speaker, she studies how businesses contribute to human rights and humanitarian law abuses in conflict-affected and high-risk areas; and what legal reforms and remedies can prevent such harms. Her research has informed the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights, governments, NGOs, and businesses. She has held major leadership roles; received multiple research and alumni awards; taught internationally; and published widely.