The mission of the Center is to increase knowledge and understanding of international human rights issues, to bring theoretical insights to the study and practice of human rights, to assist public and private human rights organizations throughout the world in addressing the increasingly complex developments in this field, and to equip succeeding generations of lawyers and other professionals with the skills needed to play vital roles in the world community.
The Center's program is interdisciplinary in scope and designed to draw upon the full intellectual resources of the Law School and the University community. The program has three basic components -- scholarship, community outreach and curriculum.
First, and most significant, there is a scholarship component. The objective is to increase measurably and consistently over time the corpus of scholarship and the range of scholarly inquiry in the international human rights field. It is clear, for example, that the human rights field is sorely in need of a systematic interdisciplinary inquiry. The Center, therefore, approaches issues in the field of international human rights from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Moreover, the human rights field encompasses a broad array of issues. The Center studies, among other issues, the justification and design of institutional arrangements as they affect the relations between the powers of the state, the state bureaucracy, the electoral system, and the reach of individual rights. The Center promotes research and study related to developing the fundamental values that give sustenance to the creation of democratic regimes, including the invention, structuring and development of juridical techniques which are best suited to ensuring a stable democracy. Studies also are undertaken to identify and analyze the social, political and economic factors that make democratic institutions and traditions viable.
Second, the Center organizes and sponsors symposia and colloquia on international human rights to meet the outreach requirements of its program. For example, theoretical elaboration of certain key concepts of constitutional reform, consolidation of democratic institutions, the relative marginalization of social and economic rights, and the role of human rights in geopolitics, remain open for serious academic discussion. The Center publishes articles and books concerned with its research objectives and outreach programs.
Finally, the Center provides undergraduate and graduate law and international relations students with an opportunity to obtain a firm grounding in international human rights law and practice. The University of Miami Law School's longstanding commitment to providing students with a legal education that draws liberally from the insights of other scholarly disciplines is well-known.
Consistent with that tradition, the Law School offers courses that employ the tools of history, economics, political science, philosophy and sociology in analyzing legal problems. Such a systematic interdisciplinary inquiry in the field of international human rights is a part of the teaching as well as scholarship components of the Center's program. This curriculum component of the program is carried out in several ways: students conduct field work related to research papers being done at the Law School for course or seminar credit; students assist the faculty of the Center in field work related to research projects being done by the Center itself and by other faculty or visitors, and students conduct research for international human rights organizations.
