Emmah Wabuke Joins Pozen Center as Director of Practice

A human rights lawyer with extensive experience in academia, Emmah Khisa Senge Wabuke shies away from referring to herself as a human rights activist. 

“I like to describe myself as a human rights pragmatist,” she says.

The new director of practice at the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, Khisa Senge will be able to exemplify that pragmatism—utilizing her work as a lawyer, scholar, and for a human rights organization. 

As part of her role, Khisa Senge will oversee the practice component of the major. All human rights majors are required to complete fieldwork or research—giving students hands-on experience in human rights work. Most students fulfill this requirement through a summer internship, some of whom pursue the selective Human Rights Summer Internship Program.

Khisa Senge appreciates the Pozen Center’s emphasis on practice, saying that some human rights academia does itself a disservice by focusing too much on theory, independent of the practice. The Pozen Center’s approach enables Khisa Senge to build on her human rights work and theorize it with students in the classroom.

“I have tried to model a career around, not only academia, but also having been a human rights practitioner,” she says. “I'm not looking at theory making practice, but really practice making the theory.”

Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach

In addition to its emphasis on practice, another unique aspect of the Pozen Center drew Khisa Senge to the role—its interdisciplinary approach. This approach makes the Pozen Center uniquely positioned to analyze the current state of human rights and foster the next generation of human rights practitioners. 

“The law will not offer all the solutions, but it still remains a powerful tool that I think needs to be tempered with other disciplines,” she says. “This is why the Pozen Center is such an important space. When you look at the faculty within the Pozen Center, they are drawn from different disciplines.

Khisa Senge believes that the law does not contain all of the solutions for countering anti-rights actors, making it crucial to look to other disciplines for solutions. She says the law should be a supporting tool to activities such as mobilization and social organizing. 

“Looking at the practicalities of what's happening in the world and the media—it really brings home the importance of engaging in serious interdisciplinary work to regain some of the human rights ideals that we preach,” Khisa Senge says.

A legacy of teaching

While legal work has played a central role in her life, Khisa Senge says that some of the most meaningful years of her career have been spent teaching. According to Khisa Senge, her mom would claim that her passion for teaching came from her grandfather—the first Black teacher, and eventually headmaster, in his village in colonial Kenya. He continued to teach after Kenya gained independence and throughout the course of his life.

When Khisa Senge accepted her first teaching position, she thought of the stories she had heard about her grandfather’s teaching career—hoping to embody the attributes that made him beloved by his students.

Khisa Senge anticipates that her experience as a Kenyan, and an immigrant who has lived in the diaspora, will help to broaden students’ perspectives. By bringing both her legal background and lived experience to the Pozen Center, she hopes to create greater diversity in how human rights are approached.

“As lawyers, we are trained to believe that the law is the savior of everything,” Khisa Senge says. “Just take it to court, and somehow you will change society.”

Khisa Senge knows from personal experience that there are many paths toward change—having witnessed them throughout her work.

Looking at the practicalities of what's happening in the world and the media—it really brings home the importance of engaging in serious interdisciplinary work to regain some of the human rights ideals that we preach.

Witnessing human rights in actioN

Khisa Senge traces her connection to human rights to her time in law school. In her first year, a friend introduced her to Moot Court competitions, where students participate in simulated proceedings before an appellate court. One Moot Court question revolved around the rights of children, which Khisa Senge found to be meaningful.

“It opened up my eyes—the ways in which we can actually utilize human rights law to create and to develop real, credible solutions for vulnerable people,” Khisa Senge says. 

Khisa Senge soon wanted to practice human rights law, but following her undergraduate studies, she unexpectedly found herself in academia. 

A new law school had opened in Nairobi, Strathmore Law School, and they recruited Khisa Senge as a tutorial assistant. Although she had intended to practice law, Khisa Senge continued to work in academia until she moved to the U.S. to pursue a master’s degree at Harvard Law School. 

Law clinic as a means of practice

During her time at Harvard, Khisa Senge saw the important role that law clinics can play in creating change and as a space to practice human rights. Her experience at Harvard inspired her to open Strathmore Law Clinic, based at Strathmore Law School, where she had previously taught.

“That’s how I started the real practice of human rights,” Khisa Senge says. 

Within two years, roughly 70 students joined the Strathmore Law Clinic, and they pursued around 10 community projects. In Kenya, the structure around practicing law is strict, prohibiting the clinic from pursuing litigation. Instead, the clinic engaged in advocacy, community engagement, and public awareness. 

The limitations of legal solutions

The Strathmore Law Clinic fostered engagement with the residents of Kibera, an informal settlement in Nairobi, which had experienced significant rates of police brutality and extrajudicial killings. The residents there did not simply want to know and be able to articulate their rights — they wanted to cultivate a relationship with state officials. 

Khisa Senge and her colleagues at the clinic organized outreach sessions between the police and the residents of Kibera. These sessions provided a platform for residents’ voices to be heard and lodge complaints. For Khisa Senge, this experience illustrated the ways existing structures can prevent people from accessing their rights. 

Rather than always looking for legal solutions, she believes that being a human rights pragmatist sometimes means stepping back and looking for other means of resolution.

“There's a perception that law has all the answers to life's questions,” Khisa Senge says. “The law remains a powerful tool—maybe one of the most powerful tools—around social ordering. But I don't think it's the only tool.”

Advancing women's rights

In addition to her many years in academia and traditional legal practice, Khisa Senge has been shaped by her work with a non-governmental organization—Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa (ISLA), which focuses on women's rights.

The organization is led exclusively by Black women and supports a network of partners across most of the African continent. This structure allows the organization to have a bird’s eye view of human rights contexts in different regions. Khisa Senge says working with the organization has shaped her as a lawyer and more broadly as an individual.

“ISLA has been instrumental in cultivating the way that I approach life,” she says. “Creating a network of Black women trying to solve Black women’s problems—it’s just been quite revolutionary for me.”