From the left and the right, human rights in the western hemisphere are under threat today — so it's little surprise that a university in Miami, the nexus of the Americas, is hosting a week-long conference on the causes and solutions.
On Sunday evening, the University of Miami School of Law convened its Human Rights in the Americas Symposium: An Examination of the Past, Present and Future.
It will run through Friday on UM's Coral Gables campus — and will include actual hearings by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the hemisphere's de facto rights watchdog.
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The gathering will take up the 21st-century erosion of democratic norms in the New World, whether driven by left-wing regimes like Venezuela's, right-wing dictatorships like El Salvador's — or even, as the symposium warns, the increasingly authoritarian Trump administration in the U.S.
“For many years we’ve seen rising authoritarianism both in our own country and throughout the hemisphere," Caroline Bettinger-López, founding director of the UM law school's Human Rights Clinic, told WLRN.
"We’re hoping to elevate that issue and help people see the ways the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights are able to uphold human rights and the rule of law — especially Americans, for whom these institutions are not household names the way they are for other peoples in the hemisphere.”
The IACHR is an arm of the Organization of American States, or OAS, which is the western hemisphere's de facto U.N.
Bettinger-López said it’s important conferences like these take place in Miami, especially since it receives so many exiles fleeing human rights violations.
“Miami is the crossroads to the Americas," Bettinger-López said.
"So we’re really trying to focus on human rights hotspots most resonant for our population here — places where the stress tests are increasingly being applied.”
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Aside from Venezuela, El Salvador and the U.S., the symposium will also focus on the human rights crises in Cuba and Haiti.
Speakers include prominent Cuban dissident José Daniel Ferrer, who arrived in Miami as an exile last month after being released from prison in Cuba; former U.S. ambassador to the OAS Frank Mora; former Miami Congresswoman (and former UM President) Donna Shalala; and human rights lawyer Brisa De Angulo, a sexual abuse victim who won a landmark case against Bolivia's government in 2023 at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
The symposium will be held at UM's Lakeside Village, 1280 Stanford Drive in Coral Gables.
