Human Rights Center

The Human Rights Center promotes human rights and international justice worldwide and trains the next generation of human rights researchers and advocates.

The Human Rights Center (HRC) is a research and training center that applies innovative technologies and scientific methods to investigate war crimes and other serious violations of human rights. Based on its findings, HRC recommends specific policy measures to protect vulnerable populations and hold perpetrators accountable. HRC trains advocates around the world and provides them with the skills and tools necessary to document human rights abuses and turn this information into effective action.

Three core goals guide the Human Rights Center's activities:

Pursue accountability for mass atrocities
Ensure that needs of survivors are heard
Strengthen the research and advocacy capacities of local and international human rights organizations

The Human Rights Center is part of the UC Berkeley School of Law.

HRC Website: http://hrc.berkeley.edu

An informal portrait of Kosar Eftekhari with a medical patch over her right eye

More Than 120 Protesters Blinded by Iranian Agents, Probe Confirms

UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center says the victims, most aged 30 and under, suffered partial or full loss of sight in the government crackdown on protests demanding women’s rights.

Decorations mark the graves of men and women in Bucha, Ukraine, who were killed by invading Russian troops after the invasion in February 2022

In Ukraine, Berkeley Experts are Shaping the Legal Fight Against War Crimes

Ukrainian law enforcement officials and NGOs are preparing for war crimes trials — and almost from the start of the war, their efforts to collect evidence have been guided by digital-age legal standards developed under the leadership of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

A Legacy of Truth: Forty Years of Investigating the Forcibly Disappeared

Eric Stover has spent much of his life with communities searching for an answer to the agonizing question, Where is my child? From Argentina, Guatemala, and El Salvador to the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Iraqi Kurdistan, Stover has sat with families in their deepest grief — often taking the first step in answering that harrowing question with a simple cheek swab, or a sample of blood or hair.

As the World Watches Ukraine, Berkeley Law Experts Discuss Recent Events and What to Expect

As the fighting in Ukraine continued Feb. 28, some of Berkeley Law’s international law experts gathered to discuss the legal and strategic implications of what’s happened — and what might come next. The hybrid roundtable drew a crowd in person and online and was moderated by Berkeley Law Professor Katerina Linos and co-sponsored by the office of Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and the school’s Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law, where Linos is the co-faculty director.

Berkeley Law Center Creates First Global Protocol on Using Social Media as Evidence for War Crimes

At the Nuremberg trials, harrowing video footage of Nazi concentration camps comprised the first use of film as evidence in international criminal prosecutions. On December 1, some 75 years later, a virtual event broadcast live from Nuremberg, Geneva, and Berkeley officially launched the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations.