In the early 2000s, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, currently the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing and professor of law and development at MIT, argued that international human rights law could help protect research, teaching, and learning at American universities against post-9/11 paranoia about “suspect” or “dangerous” ideas, especially those held by academics who were not citizens.
In recent years, multiple advanced human rights practitioners have followed Rajagopal’s lead, paying increasing attention to the best way to define and defend academic freedom (a development that was summarized in a recent Pozen Report). Today, with American academic freedom in a deepening crisis, his suggestions from over two decades ago feel prescient.
In conversation with Pozen Visiting Professor Julia Hall, Rajagopal will revisit his original argument, discuss academic freedom-related developments in human rights spaces and beyond, and suggest possible paths forward for universities in the face of current threats.
Balakrishnan Rajagopal became the United Nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing in 2020. He is Professor of Law and Development at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A lawyer by training, he is an expert on many areas of human rights, including economic, social and cultural rights, the UN system, and the human rights challenges posed by development activities.
He is the founder of the Displacement Research and Action Network at MIT which leads research and engagement with communities, NGOs, and local and national authorities. He has conducted over 20 years of research on social movements and human rights advocacy around the world focusing in particular, on land and property rights, evictions and displacement.
Rajagopal has a law degree from University of Madras, India, a masters degree in law from the American University, and an interdisciplinary doctorate in law from Harvard Law School.
He served as a human rights advisor to the World Commission on Dams and has advised numerous governments and UN agencies on human rights issues. During the 1990s he worked with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Cambodia where he was responsible for human rights monitoring, investigation, education and advocacy, and provided support to national authorities in law drafting.
Julia Hall is a US-trained lawyer who served as co-director of research in Amnesty International’s Europe Regional Office in the organization's International Secretariat from 2021-2023. Hall was Amnesty's expert on counter-terrorism and human rights in Europe from 2009-2024 and was senior legal counsel in the Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism Program at Human Rights Watch from 1996-2009.
She has conducted research, advocacy, and strategic litigation in over 25 countries and in a range of areas, including: freedom of expression in Europe; racial and gender discrimination; the prohibition against torture; refugee/migrants' rights; administrative and preventive detention; and oversight of intelligence agencies. She has also served as a trial monitor, including as a legal observer at military commissions' proceedings at Guantánamo Bay.
She has authored numerous reports, articles, op-eds and amicus briefs; conducted advocacy at the United Nations, Council of Europe, European Union, OSCE, and at national levels; and served as an expert in individual cases before the European Court of Human Rights, and in UK, Canadian and US federal courts.
Hall was an adjunct professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo between 1996 and 2003. She is a Fulbright Fellow (American University in Cairo, Egypt) and a Rotary International Fellow (Australian National University). She is a graduate of Fordham University and the SUNY Buffalo School of Law, and was a Ford Fellow at The Hague Academy of International Law and a fellow of the Salzburg Seminar. She is a former member of the International Bar Association's Task Force on Terrorism/Counter-Terrorism. Her current research focuses on freedom of speech and other expression in the context of protest movements.