Professor Fosters Human Rights in Israel
Professor Herman Schwartz is the founder of The Herman Schwartz Israel Human Rights Law Fellowship, a unique program that began the process of creating Israel’s human rights bar and much of Isarel’s civil society. Professor Schwartz’s work is featured in the October issue of The American Lawyer in an article entitled “An Amazing Legacy.”
Michael Goldhaber, who writes The Global Lawyer column, put it this way: “In 1983, Herman Schwartz visited Israel for the first time in his life in 1983, in his early fifties. He tried to plug into the human rights scene—and found there was none. Schwartz went home to American University Washington College of Law, where he's a professor, and founded what became the Herman Schwartz Israel Human Rights Fellowship.”
When the fellowship was launched, the United States was leading the way on protecting civil liberties, and Professor Schwartz’s idea was to create change in Israel by giving Israeli lawyers an opportunity to learn how to promote and protect human rights through litigation and other forms of advocacy from their U.S. colleagues. For more than thirty years, the program has been bringing two fellows from Israel — one Palestinian and one Jewish — to the American University Washington College of Law to study for an LL.M. in the International Legal Studies Program and to obtain practical experience in promoting human rights by interning with American civil rights and civil liberties organizations like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Human Rights Watch, women’s organizations, and many others.
Based on their experiences in this country, the fellows have created numerous non-governmental organizations dealing with the rights of women, gays, prisoners, Palestinians, Ethiopian immigrants, and many others. The program has been credited with “chang[ing] the face of public law in Israel” by Ha’Aretz, Israel’s leading newspaper, and has been replicated in East Europe and Africa by the Open Society Foundation.
A copy of the article is attached, as well as a brief biography of Professor Schwartz.