Three students receive Human Rights Center Fellowships

Three UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism students are among those selected to receive this year’s fellowships from the Human Rights Center at the UC Berkeley School of Law. The 14 fellows were chosen from across the UC system and will receive $5,000 to support work with partnering organizations.

Levi Bridges (’17) will travel to the Mexico-Guatemala border to report on Mexico’s Southern Border Program, a U.S.-funded initiative aimed at stopping Central American migrants from moving north. Public Radio International’s The World will air a series of his stories about the program and its links to the U.S.

Bridges said he has been interested in the Border Program since its implementation in response to a surge of migrants crossing through Central America in 2014, but he sees an even greater need for reporting on it since the election of President Trump. “It’s made the trip really dangerous, and it has not decreased the numbers,” he said. Now the program is “potentially a bargaining chip with Mexico” in U.S. efforts to construct a wall along its own southern border and renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA.)

Peter Bittner (’17) will work with a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Mongolia to gather and share the stories of nomadic herders who have been forced into urban areas by climate change. As the nomads’ native grasslands have increasingly turned to desert, they have resettled in undeveloped slums on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s largest city. With input from residents, the nonprofit Ger Community Mapping Center builds GIS maps of these sprawling neighborhoods, which allow the people who live there and their government to visualize and find solutions to environmental and infrastructure issues. Bittner will create a series a videos in two languages focused on one community of recently settled nomads.

“It’s a great way to both help an organization that’s doing amazing work while at the same time further developing and polishing my skills and give me an opportunity to freelance,” he said.

Stefanie Le (’18) will spend the summer working in the Netherlands with the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where she will help implement use of open source techniques in investigating human rights abuses around the world. It’s an extension of the work Le has undertaken with the Human Rights Center’s Investigations Lab, where Berkeley students scrutinize images and videos of alleged atrocities to confirm when and where they were gathered. Their efforts aim to provide better evidence to those investigating and prosecuting war crimes.

“Our goal is to build an international standard for verifying these videos and photos,” said Le. The web is crowded with potential evidence that could be used in legal efforts to stop human rights abuses, she said. “We’re figuring out how to preserve it before someone takes it down, how to secure it and how to keep it safe.”

The fellowships will support fieldwork conducted between May and September. Fellows will gather to present their work at a formal conference in early November at UC Berkeley.

The Human Rights Center has funded more than 300 fellowships since 1994, supporting scholars from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, biology, demography, economics, law”Óand journalism. HRC Executive Director K. Alexa Koenig said this is the first time anyone at the organization can remember three fellowships going to J-School students in a single year, though supporting reporters has long been an important part of the HRC’s mission.

“Journalists do some of the most important work in the human rights space by uncovering hidden stories of abuse and bringing those stories to light,” Koenig said. “They help mobilize human rights activists, gather information that inspires and supports the work of human rights lawyers, and pioneer research and investigations methods that are of tremendous value to the field.”

J-School alumna Laura Klivans (’16), who received one the HRC’s 2016 fellowships, produced a series of radio stories on a practice called “direct file,” which allowed California district attorneys”Ónot judges”Óto decide to have minors tried in adult courts. Since 2000, direct file was used unevenly across California, Klivans said, and blacks and Latinos were disproportionately affected. Last year’s Proposition 57 aimed to end the practice.

With help from the J-School’s Investigative Reporting Program, Klivans produced four stories that aired shortly before the election, when California voters passed the proposition and mandated that all juveniles will get a hearing before a judge to determine whether they’ll be tried as adults.

“This fellowship was meaningful to me because I have a background in human rights, but I had yet to incorporate it directly into my stories,” said Klivans. The support helped sustain her “financially and mentally” until she landed her current job as a reporter at KQED.

Koenig said Klivans is part of a tradition of UC Berkeley journalism students whose work as HRC fellows has shed light on important issues around the world.

“The Human Rights Center fellows who have come from the J-School have stood out for doing exactly what we hope every fellow will do: engage in rigorous, fact-based analysis that moves people to action,” Koenig said.

By Graelyn Brashear (’17)