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Summary Remarks from Laura Hebert

Summary Remarks

Laura Hebert Kahane U.N. Program at Occidental College Committee Co-Chair

The William and Elizabeth Kahane United Nations Program Endowment offers Occidental College a unique opportunity to generate cross-disciplinary conversations on our campus about the significance of U.N. ideas, norms, and values for the Oxy and Los Angeles communities. Traditionally, most of our on-campus Kahane U.N. Program activities have been held during our annual event-packed U.N. Week. Although the spike in COVID infections in early 2022 required that adjustments be made to our programming, our modified U.N. Week featured timely and thought-provoking events that benefited considerably from the collaborative relationship that exists between Diplomacy and World Affairs faculty and the New York-based team.

Our programming, centered on the theme of “Rights at Risk,” kicked off with an exceptional Zoom panel discussion on March 31 on the topic of “Disability, Advocacy, and Rights.” Moderated by Cynthia Rothschild, the panel brought together an accomplished and diverse group of rights advocates: Silvia Quan, a Guatemala-based feminist disability rights activist who has been a global leader in this area, including through her role on the U.N. Committee on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities; Felicia Mburu, a Kenya-based lawyer and activist who, among other activities, has focused on disability advocacy within the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights; Will Pons, senior legal advisor to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities; and Andrea Parra, a Colombia-based expert in disability and human rights and a feminist legal activist. The event not only brought visibility to a topic that is too often overlooked at Oxy and in the human rights community more generally, it also underscored how essential bottom-up advocacy around the world is to the establishment of international human rights standards and the relevance of these standards for social change efforts at the domestic level.

After a two-year suspension, we were thrilled to be able to return to in-person events in April. We were also excited to welcome Cynthia to campus for the first time as the Kahane U.N. Program director and to invite Jacques Fomerand back to campus after far too many years. Their time on campus coincided with the two-day campus visit of Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesperson for Secretary-General António Guterres (and Secretary-Generals Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon before him). Dujarric is a longtime friend of the Program and he once again proved generous with his time, including during lunches with Oxy students and faculty that allowed for more personal conversations about his long career at the U.N. The highlight of his visit, however, was a campuswide off-therecord event held on April 4 that was titled “Everything You Wanted to Know About the United Nations in the Midst of Global Crises.” Mr. Dujarric’s talk offered well-timed and invaluable insights into the unprecedented challenge Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has posed to U.N. authority and capacity, already severely stressed by the ongoing pandemic.

On April 6, Cynthia and Jacques moderated an event that featured Fall 2021 semester Kahane U.N. Program participants, titled “Oxy at the U.N.: Learning, Relearning, UNLearning,” which offered our students the opportunity to share their experiences of taking U.N.-related courses while in New York and of interning with U.N. missions, agencies, and NGOs. We capped off our U.N. Week with two events on April 7 that featured the expertise of the dynamic leaders of the Kahane U.N. Program. Jacques’ talk, titled “Ukraine Crisis: Whither the U.N.?,” focused on his decades of experience of working within the U.N. and studying human rights and conflict situations. Cynthia’s talk, titled “Too Hot to Handle? The U.N., Human Rights, and Movement Politics,” centered on the opportunities and challenges human rights advocates face when seeking to shape U.N. policies, standards, and practices. Both talks wonderfully complemented the earlier events and reaffirmed just how fortunate we are to have Cynthia and Jacques at the helm of the Kahane U.N. Program.

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