FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard

@fxbharvard.bsky.social

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The FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard is dedicated to the inextricable link between health and human rights. Learn more: fxb.harvard.edu. Stay in touch: https://tinyurl.com/3r958p2f.

December 10. War and the public's health, commemorating World Human Rights Day. 1pm-2pm EST. Jonathan M. Mann Conference Room. Open to the public. hsph.me/Peace-Health. Speaker: Barry Levy, MD, MPH, physician and epidemiologist. Moderator: Yara Asi, PhD, FXB Visiting Scientist. Welcoming remarks: Mary Bassett, MD, MPH, FXB Center Director.
A book by Margareta Matache, PhD Director of the FXB Center Roma Program for Health and Human Rights
December 10. War and the public's health, commemorating World Human Rights Day. 1pm-2pm EST. Jonathan M. Mann Conference Room. Open to the public. hsph.me/Peace-Health. Speaker: Barry Levy, MD, MPH, physician and epidemiologist. Moderator: Yara Asi, PhD, FXB Visiting Scientist. Welcoming remarks: Mary Bassett, MD, MPH, FXB Center Director.
Webinar: Report-back from the 2ND Africa-CARICOM summit on reparations. In conversation: Mary T. Bassett, MD, MPH and Brittney Francis, PhD, MPH. Moderator: Serhat Yildirim, MD, MMSc. Monday, December 8, 2025. 1pm-2pm EST, Zoom. hsph.me/CARICOM.
FXB Center for Health & Human Rights at Harvard University. We are hiring: executive assistant and administrative coordinator. Details: hsph.me/Join-Us. Apply now.
Resilience, a word that once described solidarity and shared responsibility has become a way to shift the burden onto the poor and abridge their human rights. If we truly believe in the rights we have already signed on to, resilience cannot be the end goal. Our task is not to make vulnerable populations more adaptable to injustice, but to make the powerful more accountable for it. Resilience was never meant to replace justice. And the right to health should never depend on how much suffering people can endure.” Jehane Sedky, Resilience is no substitute for justice Cognoscenti, November 21, 2025
Graphic with puzzle pieces listing Convention on the Rights of the Child articles relevant to FXB's work.
Flier with graphic of iron punishment collar with lock and logos of Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society; FXB Center for Health & Human Rights; Amare Rromentza; The Research Council of Norway; HL-Senteret: The Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies.
In conversation: Dr. L’Bertrice Solomon, LP.D., JD, MPH, MMSc, and FXB Director, Dr. Mary T. Bassett, MD, MPH. Webinar: Inherited trauma, inherited equity: Reparations as a determinant of health. Wednesday, November 19, 2025. 1:00pm-2:00pm EST.
FXB Center for Health & Human Rights at Harvard University. We are hiring: executive assistant and administrative coordinator. Details: hsph.me/Join-Us. Apply now.
Vasileia Digidiki
Dr. Margaret (Maggie) Sullivan Sullivan, FNP-BC, DrPH, FAAN
FXB Center for Health & Human Rights logo. 2025 APHA Disability Section Health Equity Award Recipient. Jumana Odeh, MD, MPH, FXB Visiting Scholar. fxb.harvard.edu.
FXB Center for Health & Human Rights at Harvard University. We are hiring: executive assistant and administrative coordinator. Details: hsph.me/Join-Us. Apply now.
“The thread that runs through all of child exploitation is the normalization of violence. What is so difficult to change? There needs to be a paradigm shift.” Nandana Dev Sen. Treating violence against children as a disease, October 28, 2025.
Our new analysis of COVID-19 donor funding reveals a profound disconnect between the rhetoric of global solidarity and the reality: 60% of official development assistance was issued as loans while direct support to partner governments was minimal with less than nine percent reaching partner governments as grants.” Jehane Sedky, Abbey GardneR, Louise C. Ivers, Loans dominated COVID-19 funding: it's time to adjust, The Lancet, October 25, 2025
FXB Center for Health & Human Rights at Harvard University. We are hiring: executive assistant and administrative coordinator. Details: hsph.me/Join-Us. Apply now.
Photo of printed issues of the Health and Human Rights journal.
Treating violence against children as a disease. A panel of experts and activists will join Dr. Susan Bissell for several wide-ranging discussions following the publication of the book she co-edited: Protecting the World’s Children: Public Health, Human Rights, Capabilities
Brittney Francis and Mary Bassett in conversation.
Join the Leah Zallman Center for Immigrant Health Research (LZC), François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, the Health & Law Immigrant Solidarity Network (HLISN), and Massachusetts healthcare partners for a virtual update on immigration law and policy from panelists Susan Church, Chief Operating Officer & Legal Advisor at MA Office for Refugees and Immigrants (ORI); and Heather Yountz, Senior Immigration Staff Attorney at Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. Healthcare leaders, providers, workers, public health professionals, and members of the public encouraged to attend.
Multiple interrelated factors drive child migration. While some overlap with the drivers of adult migration, girls also migrate as a result of child-specific persecution and harms, such as recruitment as a child soldier, child abuse, child marriage, and the threat of female circumcision. Being denied a regular pathway toward a more rights-respecting life, they are forced to migrate without the proper documentation and identification and are thus more likely to face increased chances for abuse. An effective system of support and legal representation and protection centering children, and particularly girls, in host countries would go a long way towards safeguarding their safety and future. Vasileia Digidiki, MSc, PhD and Jacqueline Bhabha, JD, MSc, “The protection chasm: Contemporary child migration and the enduring denial of legal, safe or regular mobility options” in Bissell, Susan, and A.K. Shiva Kumar (eds), Protecting the World's Children: public health, human rights, capabilities, Oxford, 2025.
The protection of all children is inextricably linked to the life experience of women, adolescents, and girls. Threats like technology-facilitated cyber harassment, climate change, and environmental degradation exacerbate the risk of violence against women and girls and the likelihood they will face displacement and food scarcity. Sexual violence and early or forced marriage are realities too. Ample evidence shows that effective efforts to keep children safe will require even more focused attention on gendered differences. From a public health and human rights perspective, prevention is key. Susan Bissell, BA, MA, PhD, Bissell, Susan, and A.K. Shiva Kumar (eds), Protecting the World's Children: public health, human rights, capabilities, Oxford, 2025.
Join the Leah Zallman Center for Immigrant Health Research (LZC), François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, the Health & Law Immigrant Solidarity Network (HLISN), and Massachusetts healthcare partners for a virtual update on immigration law and policy from panelists Susan Church, Chief Operating Officer & Legal Advisor at MA Office for Refugees and Immigrants (ORI); and Heather Yountz, Senior Immigration Staff Attorney at Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. Healthcare leaders, providers, workers, public health professionals, and members of the public encouraged to attend.
Photo of printed issues of the Health and Human Rights journal.
FXB Center for Health & Human Rights logo. "I sincerely valued the opportunity to attend this esteemed child protection program. Not only did the broad range of topics really help me to holistically think of strategies to improve child protection practices, I also deeply appreciated the opportunity to learn and hear from the other participants in regards to child protection issues in their country context." G. Barrie Landry Child Protection Professional Training program participant. fxb.harvard.edu.
Special guest alert! Disrupting Peace, Susan Bissell, BA, MA, PhD. I'll be discussing the "First Steps to a Peaceful Childhood for All" on the Disrupting Peace podcast. Dropping September 30th! Tune in on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
FXB Center for Health & Human Rights logo. "Structural racism" is not a "thing" that can be measured using a single metric; it is a unifying concept that extends understanding of the origins of racialized variations in health- related exposures and outcomes beyond the individual level and beyond the issue of the composition and beliefs of the scientific and health systems workforce. Nancy Krieger, PHD AND Mary T. Bassett, MD, MPH. Structural and Scientific Racism, Science, and Health — Evidence versus Ideology, The New England Journal of Medicine, September 20, 2025
Child protection certificate program. Are you passionate about child protection? The FXB Center’s Child Protection Certificate Program (CPC) is a pioneering initiative that offers Harvard graduate students a unique, interdisciplinary qualification in child protection and equips future professionals with essential tools and perspectives. Courses integrate diverse sectors such as health, education, social services, and law enforcement. Apply now! hsph.me/FXB-CPC
FXB Center for Health and Human Rights logo. "The interactive exercises helped solidify my understanding and gave me confidence in how to translate the knowledge and information gained into my daily work. What I appreciated most about the training was engaging in discussions with amazing professors, my colleagues from other countries and hearing diverse perspectives significantly enriched my takeaways. I left feeling motivated and supported in putting the lessons into action.“ G. Barrie Landry Child Protection Professional Training program participant.
FXB Center for Health and Human Rights logo. We are all implicated in the climate crisis. An earnest response demands we acknowledge how we got here in the first place. Satchit Balsari, MD, MPH.
FXB Center for Health and Human Rights logo. There is a hunger for health professionals to come together and think of solutions around how to care for our earth and a way of caring for people in every part of the world. Gaurab Basu, MD, MPH, FXB Faculty Affiliate.
Child protection certificate program. Are you passionate about child protection? The FXB Center’s Child Protection Certificate Program (CPC) is a pioneering initiative that offers Harvard graduate students a unique, interdisciplinary qualification in child protection and equips future professionals with essential tools and perspectives. Courses integrate diverse sectors such as health, education, social services, and law enforcement. Apply now! hsph.me/FXB-CPC
Logos: FXB Center for Health & Human Rights at Harvard University, Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights, Harvard University Department of English, Harvard History Department. The Message: A book talk with author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates. Wednesday, September 24, 2025. 6:00pm-7:00pm EDT. Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall. Harvard ID required. Register: Hsph.me/the-message. Doors open at 5:30.
"Phenomenal: The topics, instructors, and the learning environment were all harmonized, permitting a holistic understanding of the child protection field." G. Barrie Landry Child Protection Professional Training program participant.
Child protection certificate program. Are you passionate about child protection? The FXB Center’s Child Protection Certificate Program (CPC) is a pioneering initiative that offers Harvard graduate students a unique, interdisciplinary qualification in child protection and equips future professionals with essential tools and perspectives. Courses integrate diverse sectors such as health, education, social services, and law enforcement. Apply now! hsph.me/FXB-CPC
Child protection certificate program. Are you passionate about child protection? The FXB Center’s Child Protection Certificate Program (CPC) is a pioneering initiative that offers Harvard graduate students a unique, interdisciplinary qualification in child protection and equips future professionals with essential tools and perspectives. Courses integrate diverse sectors such as health, education, social services, and law enforcement. Apply now! hsph.me/FXB-CPC
Group photo of 2025 Landry program cohort on the steps of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Race-based pulmonary-function test (PFT) guidelines were taught to clinicians for decades, despite questions about their validity and implications of use. Within medicine, a growing consensus gradually emerged for ending inaccurate and imprecise uses of race as a standalone proxy for biologic or genetic traits. Significant gaps persist, however, in implementation of race-neutral PFT equations in the United States and worldwide, because race has long been embedded in PFT interpretation. The path to universally equitable evaluation of occupational pulmonary-function impairment—and to remedying the harms of previous race-based approaches—will benefit from further engagement with patients, medical societies, regulatory bodies, payers, researchers, and clinicians.” Rohan Khazanchi, MD, MPH, FXB Affiliate
Image of glass globe with stethoscope around it on top of grass.
"Current standards for access to medical care in state juvenile confinement facilities are insufficient to address the urgent and unmet health needs of incarcerated youth. There is a need for strengthened standards enshrined in state and federal law, which are more durable than policy or administrative code, along with legislated monitoring and oversight frameworks. These measures are crucial to ensuring that incarcerated youth receive at least the same standard of care as their peers in the community.” Tess L. Kelly, Joshua Dankoff, Elizabeth Barnert “Minimum Standards for Medical Care of Youth Incarcerated Across the United States” Pediatrics, July 21, 2025
While some official statements and ceremonies that commemorate the Holocaust acknowledge its Roma and Sinti victims – such as during the recent 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – many institutions still depict and distance them as part of a separate genocide or as “other victims” of Nazi regimes. In part, this stems from the racist myth of criminality that accompanied the campaign of mass extermination of Romani people and the telling of history afterwards. Margareta Matache, PhD, Lecturer, Director of the FXB Center Roma Program for Health and Human Rights. “Allowing racist tropes about Romani people to persist is dangerous” Al Jazeera Opinion, 2025
Flier: Applications are now open for the Global COACH Fellowship.
Poverty, lack of opportunity, social disintegration following conflict, gender inequality and its omnipresence, all correlate with domestic and child sexual abuse. The indomitable human search for survival and self-advancement opportunities are central drivers of human trafficking. Until the inevitable reality of mixed motives for migration is acknowledged in border control implementation in practice – the intertwining within irregular child migrant flows of persecution by the trafficker and economic aspiration by the child migrant or his or her family – the response to child trafficking is unlikely to progress into an effective tool for child protection. Bhabha, J. (2014). “Targeting the Right Issue: Trafficked Children and the Human Rights Imperative,” in Child Migration & Human Rights in a Global Age. Princeton University Press.
The dominant theory explaining trafficking has gaps: the wrong framework leads to ineffective policies. Viewing trafficking as fueled by demand from exploiters, delivery by traffickers, supply of victims misses out a second equally crucial demand-delivery-supply chain. In this chain, demand comes from victims of structural inequality, who have no choice but to seek opportunity, escape, income, security and hope away from where they live and have a social support system. Delivery comes from migration professionals – smugglers and traffickers – who exploit the need for migration. Meanwhile, the supply of funds fueling this lucrative migration business comes from those waiting to prey on exploitable migrants. This perspective suggests that an additional set of anti-trafficking strategies is needed. Bhabha, J. (2014). “Targeting the Right Issue: Trafficked Children and the Human Rights Imperative,” in Child Migration & Human Rights in a Global Age. Princeton University Press.
Flier: Applications are now open for the Global COACH Fellowship.
FXB's Margaret (Maggie) Sullivan and Jess Santos of the Leah Zallman Center for Immigrant Health Research at the Society of Refugee Healthcare Providers Conference 2025.
World Congress on Family & Children's Rights. Children Caught in Conflict: Inspiring Positive Change. Conference: Cambridge, United Kingdom, 27 - 30 July 2025.
“One of the pathways by which structural racism drives health inequity is through differential access and care provided by health care institutions. Healing ARC — acknowledgment, redress, and closure — is a pragmatic health justice framework aiming to correct and redress a documented racial inequity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in specialty cardiology access for Black and Latine patients with heart failure. This approach, composed of members of the communities impacted by this inequity, produced a targeted mechanism to achieve redress through a computerized clinical decision support system. It is also a broadly adaptable, actionable model for other such documented inequities, responding to the need for reparative interventions that ensure ethical and legal equality.” A Healing ARC for Institutional Trustworthiness: Evaluating a Clinical Decision Support System to Redress Racial Inequities Wispelwey, B., Morse, M. E., Li, Z., Georges, C., Eberly, L.A., Rogers, A., Wilson, M., McEl
Photo of man walking with child in arms in front of wall with barbed wire. Graffiti of child holding bouquet of colorful balloons on wall.
National Museum of African American History & Culture - Smithsonian. "The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free..." - Major General, Gordon Granger, General Orders, No.3. Headquarters District of Texas, Galveston, June 19, 1865.
2025 cohort of G. Barrie Landry Child Protection Professional Training program posing with their certificates of completion.
Hum Sab Ek: We Are One flier.The ColonnadesILO Headquarters, GenevaMay 30 - June 25, 2025. SEWA.
Romanian Roma self-taught artist Emanuel Barica captured the portraits of Roma and Sinti survivors of the Holocaust who did not “let the abuse they suffered define them as victims, but as warriors who stood up and confronted everyday injustice and the horrific cruelty of the Nazi regime. The persecution of Roma – and Roma history in general – is often marginalized and forgotten, lacking the recognition it deserves. Focusing on Roma agency, the life stories of these 23 Roma heroes not only stand as testimony to a painful past but point us to lessons that we can learn from those whose humanity remained strong even as fascism and barbarity swept through Europe.” Exhibition: Roma Heroes of Resistance – Emanuel Barica 31 July - 1 August 2024 | Jagiellonian University, Kraków
Flier: Film Screening, Monday, May 5, 2025, 12pm-2pm EDT. Jonathan M Mann Conference Room (FXB 7th Floor).
World Congress on Family & Children's Rights. Children Caught in Conflict: Inspiring Positive Change. Conference: Cambridge, United Kingdom, 27 - 30 July 2025.