Anjli Parrin Joins Pozen Center Faculty Board

Anjli Parrin, the head of the UChicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic (GHRC), has joined the faculty board of the Pozen Center, where she will help create opportunities for undergraduates to get experience with innovative human rights research and practice.

This work is already underway. Last summer, Parrin hosted Pozen human rights interns at the GHRC, supervising their research, which was included in a United Nations report. Starting this semester, in a collaboration with the Pozen Center’s Global Human Rights Lab, qualified undergraduates are joining research and advocacy teams at the GHRC. These students are learning firsthand what it looks like to engage with the world’s major human rights mechanisms and institutions.

“The great thing about a law clinic is that it’s a chance to experiment, a chance to innovate, a chance to look at things differently,” Parrin says. “So working more closely with the Pozen Center is a perfect fit.”

A Life in Rights Work

Parrin traces her interest in human rights law to the experience of growing up in Kenya, and specifically to witnessing the months of violence that followed its contested 2007 elections. She sees that violence as, in large part, a failure of the country’s central institutions, many of which were leftover from the British colonial era. The constitution contained few guaranteed rights and no provisions for decentralized power, which contributed to widespread dissatisfaction and resentment. Additionally, after the violence ended, there were no measures to advance justice and hold senior perpetrators accountable. As the years went on, Parrin saw how this lack of accountability affected families and communities, preventing them from moving on.

As a result of these experiences, Parrin has always focused equally on what human rights law says and the question of how it can actually be enforced. For example: much of her career has focused on mass atrocity investigation. All over the world, she has collaborated with forensic investigation teams to make sure their work serves the unique purposes and requirements of human rights investigations. 

“Forensic scientists have a lot of knowledge that is extremely useful to human rights lawyers. But they don’t automatically know what the lawyers need. That takes training, that takes collaboration. That’s work we do to make the laws work, to make rights real,” she says.

It was through her work on mass atrocities that Parrin met Morris Tidball-Binz, an expert in the application of forensic techniques to human rights work, the current UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, and, as of this fall, a visiting researcher at UChicago, co-sponsored by the Pozen Center and the Law School. Many of the GHRC’s current projects are in service of Tidball-Binz’s ongoing research on the many forms that unlawful state killing can take – and how they might be stopped.

But Parrin is also interested in interventions outside of traditional legal avenues. For a recent project on climate change, GHRC students collaborated with activists from the Pacific Islands, a design and visual investigations firm in New York, and an artist to create a film that examines a recent International Court of Justice advisory opinion on climate change alongside the perspectives of people from communities already bearing the brunt of climate change’s impacts. The film is currently on exhibition at the Architekturmuseum der TUM at the Pinakotech der Moderne museum in Munich, Germany.

“I never thought that as a lawyer I would ever be making a film, or doing anything in a museum space,” Parrin says. “But for me it’s all been part of a process of asking questions about the law. Not just ‘what are the possibilities that the law offers?’ but also ‘where are the limits?’ The law works in part through people caring about it, or believing in it. And some of those conversations have to happen outside of courtrooms and legal filings.”

The Clinic as a Space For Experiments

For Parrin, a university-based clinic setting is the perfect space for sorting out these questions. “We’re not a firm worried about client payments. We’re not an NGO,  subject to the demands of  philanthropy. We have room to slow down and think a little differently, to take a 10-year or 20-year view. We can be creative. We can experiment and make mistakes and learn from them, and that can be where our contribution comes from.”

Accountability remains a central interest – but, over time, Parrin has come to think that the process of fighting for rights has a meaning and an impact that exists separately from any specific outcome. “Often, especially when it comes to a criminal justice system, the outcome might not be sufficient,” she says.” You might not get that conviction. You might not get the sentence you want or the reparations you seek. But the process of doing something matters. Doing something helps people recover some dignity, feel included, feel heard, feel respected.”

“That’s maybe the biggest thing I’ve come to learn. Rights are, as much as anything else, a process. What I’m trying to do at the clinic is help people understand that process and find their way of getting involved.”