Lowenstein Clinic Students Contribute to Human Rights Efforts Amid Anti-Rights Trends

Students in the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School are engaging directly with the institutions and mechanisms shaping the future of international human rights law. Through sustained work with mandate holders of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Special Procedures, clinic students are contributing to efforts to document violations, assess legal accountability, and respond to emerging forms of rights restriction under conditions of profound institutional strain.

This fall, clinic students Jessica Anania ’27 and Atia Ahmed ’26 joined in a regional convening of the U.N. Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls in Belgrade, Serbia. Their work included presenting clinic research on artificial intelligence and gender equality, participating in high-level meetings, and collecting legal and policy inputs from judges, academics, civil society organizations, and U.N. institutions from across the Balkans. The discussions focused on the protection of women human rights defenders, freedom of assembly and expression, and the role of state corruption in undermining gender equality.

"Meeting with faculty, judges, and civil society actors at the University of Belgrade underscored the immediate legal stakes of our work” said Anania. “We were working through the challenges international human rights standards face when courts are under pressure and civil society space is shrinking. It reinforced how law operates under strain." 

“Through conversations with activists, we learned about how democratic backsliding and anti-gender backlash are compounding one another in the region,” Ahmed reflected. “It was also interesting to hear how those dynamics are amplified by global politics and social media, including from the U.S.” Both students emphasized that the experience deepened their understanding of law as a structural tool for both protection and resistance to anti-rights movements. “As future lawyers, we have a duty to defend the rule of law when it is under direct attack,” Anania said. “That defense is foundational to any meaningful response to anti-rights backlash, as the law is likely to be the primary tool we will wield for that work.”

Reflecting on the significance of the students’ engagement, U.N. Working Group Chair and Lowenstein Director Professor Claudia Flores noted, “What students are encountering in places like Belgrade is not human rights law as an abstraction, but as a contested set of commitments operating under real political pressure. They are seeing, firsthand, how fragile legal protections can be — and why careful legal analysis, institutional engagement, and sustained advocacy still matter.”

This past summer, Lowenstein Clinic students Josie Scriven ’26 and Ty Gamble-Eddington ’27 participated in a session of the U.N. Human Rights Council session in Geneva, supporting the U.N. Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, Graeme Reid — who is also a faculty member at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs — in the presentation of a thematic report on forced displacement based on sexual orientation and gender identity. In the weeks leading up to the session, the students conducted country-specific legal analysis, prepared anticipated state questions, and drafted responses grounded in the mandate’s legal framework and objectives. 

“Before the session, we worked closely on the legal framing of both the country contexts and the thematic report,” said Scriven. “During the dialogue, we also spoke with representatives from various civil society organizations to better understand how they engage with the special procedures system in practice and where legal advocacy has the most impact.”

For Gamble-Eddington, the experience offered a close view of how international accountability actually functions under political constraint. “In supporting Graeme’s advocacy, I learned about the balance that special procedures mandate holders must strike in a system designed around members states and where members states can refuse to engage if they so wish. The name of the game is amplifying good practices, identifying gaps, and trying to bring even reluctant governments to recognize existing problems and rectify them,” he said. “The work of the U.N. special procedure mechanisms is more important today than it has ever been.”

Scriven and Gamble-Eddington also recently joined Reid at the 2025 Pan Africa ILGA Conference, a major gathering of LGBTQ+ organizations and advocates across the continent. In addition to supporting Reid’s formal engagements, the students participated in several key regional consultations that will help shape the mandate’s upcoming work.

Reflecting on the broader implications of the clinic’s work, Scriven emphasized the importance of translating local experience into legal and institutional language. “Lawyers and law students translate lived realities on the ground into the legal claims the international system can act upon. That translation enables engagement with states through mechanisms that require them to account for their conduct, helps civil society actors access state processes, identifies and leverages the legal tools that remain viable, and creates openings for political will to emerge. It also forces us to think about what the current legal order can do and how it must evolve,” she said.

These field experiences became the basis for collective legal analysis, skills-based learning, and sustained debate in the clinic. In student-led rounds, Anania and Ahmed raised urgent questions about how lawyers can respond to shrinking civic space and attacks on the rule of law, while Scriven and Gamble-Eddington pressed the group to grapple with global rollbacks on the rights of sexual orientation and gender identity communities and the limits of State compliance. These discussions unfolded alongside seminar sessions on fact-finding, multilateral enforcement, and treaty compliance. Across these conversations, students examined how intersecting human rights violations map onto the erosion of legal infrastructure, how domestic constitutionalism both enables and constrains international commitments, and what effective advocacy looks like across sharply different political and cultural settings. Each project thus became part of a shared inquiry into how the human rights system is being reshaped under pressure.

“At a time when human rights institutions face unprecedented political and financial strain, the work of the Lowenstein Clinic reflects a generation of students grappling directly with the fragility — and the necessity — of legal systems built to protect human dignity,” said Flores. “Through their research and field work, students are not simply observing the evolution of international human rights law; they are participating in the difficult work of sustaining it.”