A Tireless Advocate for Youngsters’s Rights Leaves HRP
We lately bade farewell to HRP’s Eleanor Roosevelt Visiting Fellow Benyam Dawit Mezmur, who returned to his common place as Professor of Legislation and Deputy Dean on the College of the Western Cape in Cape City, South Africa.
In his 16 months at Harvard Legislation Faculty, Benyam left a deep and lasting impression on the human rights group at HLS and Harvard. From visitor lectures on the Harvard Legislation Faculty Venture on Incapacity and the Harvard Kennedy Faculty, to panel discussions and lectures on the Chan Faculty of Public Well being (together with by the G. Barrie Landry Baby Safety Skilled Coaching program), he was a extremely sought-after skilled on youngsters’s rights. Whereas at Harvard, he lectured on matters as various because the impression of the Covid-19 pandemic on youngsters in Africa, migration, digital media, local weather change and kids’s rights, discrimination based mostly on chronological age, and the safety of kids of ISIS fighters in Syria.
In his contributions, Benyam drew from his a long time of expertise as a number one tutorial on youngsters’s rights and longtime member of the UN Baby Rights Committee, the Pontifical Fee for the Safety of Minors, and former member of the African Committee of Specialists on the Rights and Welfare of the Baby. “Benyam was a unprecedented enrichment for HRP and Harvard Legislation Faculty. School and college students alike benefited tremendously from his incisiveness, unyielding inquisitiveness and deep generosity,” mentioned HRP Director Gerald L. Neuman.
Throughout his time at HRP, Benyam pursued a number of tutorial tasks – the primary one being the completion of a quantity concerning the African Constitution on the Rights and Welfare of the Baby, the one current complete regional authorized framework for youngsters’s proper. As a former member of the Committee monitoring the implementation of the Constitution, Benyam is among the many foremost consultants on the topic. Coinciding with the Constitution’s 30-year anniversary, the ebook venture appears again at its achievements and engages with rising youngster rights points crucial to Africa.
Upon Benyam’s arrival at HLS in March 2022, it didn’t take him lengthy to strike friendships and make new acquaintances. Inside his first months, past bonding together with his fast colleagues, Benyam had already chatted with Dean Manning and College President Bacow and grow to be pleasant with the custodians of Wasserstein Corridor. Subsequent to the diligent documentation of his time at HLS by IOS notes, colleagues will even keep in mind Benyam for the dependable provide of Swiss chocolate bars positioned discreetly on desks following his journeys to Geneva.
HRP Affiliate Abadir M. Ibrahim mentioned, “Benyam has all of the qualities one would hope for in a human rights colleague. He’s principled, compassionate, good, and goal in his analyses. On prime of all that, he additionally manages to hold himself with admirable lightheartedness that weaves humorous however sharp metaphors and allegories into considerate engagement.”
Benyam described his keep at HRP and Harvard as “the perfect time of my tutorial profession” and talked about that he “appears ahead to persevering with his engagement sooner or later”.
We want Benyam all the perfect for the current and future – his heat presence shall be sorely missed at HRP.
