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Dear friends and alums,
Human rights work is, at its core, an affirmation of belonging. It insists that we belong to one another, to our communities, to the Earth we share, and to future generations who will live with the legacy of our actions or inaction. This belief animates the work of the Human Rights Clinic and guides our students, clients, and partners as they confront systems built to deny that belonging.
Belonging is not just a slogan, it is a responsibility. Few actions embody that truth more faithfully than Maria Puga’s decision to bring her husband’s case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Anastasio Hernandez Rojas was tortured and killed by U.S. border agents in 2010.
Maria’s fifteen-year pursuit of justice is an assertion of belonging: a demand that she and her family be recognized as part of the community the United States is bound to protect. Earlier this year, when the Commission found the U.S. responsible for the racially motivated extrajudicial killing of Anastasio, Maria called it a victory for dignity. She said she hoped the decision would give people the strength to fight for their dignity and their belonging.
Across our docket, our students and partners are echoing this call and fulfilling this responsibility. In our collaboration with the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, students documented how defenders of land, natural resources, and environment are being silenced by violence and impunity. In our white paper on domestic oversight of counterterrorism, they proposed legal frameworks and institutions to protect civic space. Through research on transnational repression and the expulsion of migrants, they traced how governments reach across borders to punish dissent and exclude those deemed undeserving.
Belonging also defines how we work together. Through our Virtual Salon Series, we’ve connected students, alumni, and partners across continents to reflect on what it means to defend dignity, demand belonging, and support one another in the long work of justice.
The message that surrounds us today is the opposite of belonging. Governments and institutions are using fear to redraw the boundaries of community and to decide who counts and who is disposable. Exclusion has become a political strategy; isolation its purpose, and cruelty its means. Against this reality, our work carries a steady counterpoint.
As always, we are deeply grateful for your support and for standing with us for justice – and belonging.
With appreciation for this community,
Roxanna Altholz
P.S. Please consider supporting the Human Rights Clinic and its students by making a donation. Donations over $50 will receive a clinic tote bag and t-shirt as a thank-you gift. See details below.
| | Justice at the Border
Anastasio Hernández Rojas v. United States | | In a ground-breaking decision issued in April 2025, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights held the United States responsible for the killing and torture of Anastasio Hernández Rojas, a longtime San Diego resident and father of five who died at the hands of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in 2010. The Commission found that agents used excessive force while Anastasio was restrained, acted with racial bias, and that U.S. authorities failed to conduct an impartial investigation or provide justice to his family. It ordered the government to reopen the criminal investigation and reform its laws to prevent future abuses. | | Pictured above: Maria Puga, widow of Anastasio Hernández Rojas. | | |
This decision is the first time an international body has found U.S. law enforcement responsible for an extrajudicial killing. It is also the culmination of nearly ten years of work by dozens of clinic students who, alongside co-counsel at Alliance San Diego and the family, built the record, drafted legal submissions, and represented the family before the Commission.
At a time when migrants face vilification and violence, this official acknowledgment of wrongdoing is a public reckoning and a measure of truth for Anastasio’s family and for all those who have suffered at the hands of border agents. The Clinic’s long-term commitment to this case demonstrates what sustained, principled advocacy can achieve even in the face of impunity.
| | Defending the Defenders
A Global Study on Enforced Disappearance | | |
The Human Rights Clinic contributed to a landmark United Nations report examining one of the most urgent human rights crises of our time — the enforced disappearance of those who defend land, natural resources, and the environment. Released by the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances in September, this global study reveals how defenders protecting their communities and ecosystems are being targeted by powerful interests.
Drawing on research and consultations conducted around the world, the report examines systemic patterns of collusion among government actors, corporations, and financial institutions, and situates these violations within broader contexts of corruption, impunity, and shrinking civic space. It documents how Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and rural communities bear the heaviest burden of these violations.
| | “Enforced disappearances of land, natural resources, and environmental defenders not only violate the rights of the disappeared persons and those of their families, it hinders collective efforts to safeguard the planet." | |
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Clinic students, supervised by Professor Roxanna Altholz and Clinical Supervising Attorney Radhika Kapoor, worked closely with the report’s lead author, Ana Lorena Delgadillo Pérez. Students played a key role in the research, helping to analyze international standards and statements by human rights bodies, map patterns of perpetrators, victims, and repressive tactics, trace the role of banks and corporations in enabling violence against defenders, and identify best practices for prevention, search and accountability strategies. Their work contributed to a deeper understanding of the intersection between environmental destruction, human rights violations, and the global economy.The Clinic also co-sponsored consultations and the report’s launch.
The study marks a significant step forward in clarifying the legal obligations of both States and businesses and in affirming that the defense of land and the environment is inseparable from the defense of life itself.
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Strengthening Oversight, Protecting Civic Space
New White Paper on Domestic Oversight of Counterterrorism Measures
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In many countries, including the United States, national security and counterterrorism measures have been used to suppress dissent and weaken civil society. Broad laws and unchecked powers have placed activists, journalists, and NGOs under surveillance, frozen their assets, and criminalized their work in the name of security.
In Domestic Oversight of Counterterrorism Measures, clinic students worked with Charity & Security Network to examine how independent oversight mechanisms can restore balance and accountability. Drawing on extensive research and consultations with experts, civil society organizations, and UN bodies, the paper outlines practical options for establishing domestic oversight institutions with authority, independence, and expertise.
By identifying core principles–transparency, proportionality, and respect for human rights–the paper demonstrates how strong oversight can safeguard civic space while ensuring that legitimate security objectives are met. The Clinic’s work contributes to a global conversation on how to ensure that efforts to combat terrorism do not become a source of repression.
| | The Right to Defend Human Rights
Defending Diaspora and Exiled Activists from Transnational Repression | | |
Across the world, the reach of repression no longer ends at a country’s borders. Governments are pursuing critics and dissidents abroad through digital harassment, threats, abduction, and even assassinations, sending a chilling message to those who dare speak out. Human rights bodies have labelled this phenomenon transnational repression — a term which recognizes the global reach of the issue and its impact upon human rights defenders everywhere.
In response, clinic students, under the supervision of Clinical Supervising Attorney Radhika Kapoor, are working closely with a United Nations (UN) Special Procedure to examine how international law can be used to confront this expanding threat. In the fall, clinic students curated nineteen case studies exposing the range of tactics used by states and the particular risks faced by religious and ethnic minorities living in exile. They found that the targets of transnational repression include human rights activists, poets, journalists, scholars, humanitarian aid organizations, and political dissidents across nearly every region of the world.
Their work goes beyond legal analysis to lay the foundation for an international response that calls on states, international organizations, and civil society to better identify, prevent, and respond to these abuses. By clarifying legal obligations and identifying concrete measures for prevention and accountability, the Clinic contributes to global efforts to defend the rights of exiled and diaspora activists to free expression, association, and personal integrity across borders.
| Justice Beyond Borders
Documenting Chain Refoulement and States’ Responsibility | |
In 2025, the US government has expanded the scope and arbitrariness of its efforts to expel migrants without due process, expelling immigrants to Panama, Costa Rica, and countries across Africa including South Sudan, Rwanda, Ghana, and Eswatini; rendering Venezuelan immigrants to prisons in El Salvador; and deporting Venezuelans stepwise through Guantanamo Bay, among others. These returns to terrifying and untenable conditions – sending migrants to systematic torture in prison, or Latin American nationals to countries as far away as South Sudan, or Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants to Central America, where they have no linguistic or cultural ties – represent calculated cruelty intended to det1er migration. In case after case, receiving countries work to quickly return migrants to their home countries, ignoring migrants’ rights to asylum protections.
In response to this growing trend, clinic students, under the supervision of Clinical Supervising Attorney Helen Kerwin, are working with civil society organizations in Central America to document the ill treatment and barriers to asylum protection that the US and receiving countries have enacted. By working with organizations to trace the journeys of individuals induced or pushed by circumstances to leave the receiving country, this project will demonstrate how receiving countries collaborate in a chain of rights violations started by the US’ expulsions, exposing them to legal liability. In a submission to multiple UN Special Procedures, students will discuss the inhumane detention conditions and lack of support in receiving countries, who collaborate in chain refoulement by pushing third-country nationals to seek or accept further return to unsafe countries.
| | Pursuing Truth and Justice for Defenders of Indigenous Territory | | In February 2025, Human Rights Clinic Director Roxanna Altholz was appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to serve as one of three independent experts on the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) investigating the 2016 assassination of Honduran environmental and Indigenous rights leader Berta Cáceres. | | | | |
The GIEI’s mandate is to uncover who ordered and financed Cáceres’s murder, investigate related crimes, and propose structural reparations. Working alongside experts Ricardo Aníbal Guzmán Loyo and Pedro Martín Biscay, Altholz has conducted an intensive investigation into state, corporate, and financial accountability for the crime and its ongoing impacts on Indigenous Lenca communities.
Clinic students and Supervising Attorney Helen Kerwin have joined Altholz in the field, gaining hands-on experience in human rights investigation, international accountability, and reparations design. The GIEI’s final report which is expected early next year will address entrenched impunity and the structural conditions that enable violence and ensure impunity against human rights defenders across the Americas.
| | As Altholz noted, “Protecting people like Berta is essential to protecting the planet.” | | | | |
We are thrilled to congratulate Human Rights Clinic alum Belén de León ’25, recipient of the Brian M. Sax ’69 Prize for Excellence in Clinical Advocacy. Over four semesters in the Clinic, Belén impressed faculty and peers alike with her unwavering commitment to justice and remarkable skill as an advocate.
We also celebrate Clinic alums Lorena Ortega-Guerrero ’25 and Marian Ávila Breach ’25 for their outstanding public service awards.
Read the Service Star Article to learn more about these 2025 alumni >
| | We also congratulate alumna Carmen Atkins on her appointment as Assistant Clinical Professor and Director of the Immigration Clinic at St. Thomas University College of Law, and celebrate her continued impact as a past Sax Prize recipient. | | |
The Virtual Salon Series
Conversations with Human Rights Clinic Alumni
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Earlier this year, the Human Rights Clinic launched its Virtual Salon Series, a space for alumni and partners working on the front lines of human rights to reconnect, exchange ideas, and reflect together on the defining challenges of our time. Each session invites alumni to share how human rights strategies can be deployed to defend democracy and advance justice in a rapidly changing world.
More than a speaker series, the Salons are a gathering place and an opportunity to strengthen relationships within our community and to think collectively about the practice and purpose of human rights.
| | | | In Spring 2025, the Clinic hosted Defending Human Dignity: The Trump Administration’s Assault on Migrants and the Plan for Resistance, featuring Ritu Mahajan Estes ’07 (Public Counsel), Mary Ghandour ’18 (International Refugee Assistance Project), Andrea Guerrero ’99 (Alliance San Diego), and Kennji Kizuka ’15 (International Rescue Committee). Together, they engaged over twenty alumni in an honest discussion about state violence, cross-border advocacy, and the resilience of migrant communities. | | The Fall 2025 Salon, Global Strategies for Confronting New Authoritarianisms, brought together Fionnuala Ní Aoláin (University of Minnesota Law School and former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism), Astrid Marisela Ackerman ’18 (Center for Reproductive Rights), Angélica Salceda (ACLU of Northern California), and Richard Weir ’16 (Human Rights Watch) to explore transnational strategies for defending democratic institutions and civic space. | | | Looking ahead, we invite all Clinic alumni to join us this spring for a conversation at our next Salon on the human rights implications of climate change for global migration. | | | | Free Gift With $50+ Donation | As a thank you for gifts of $50 or more, donors will receive a clinic tote bag and t-shirt. We’re grateful for your support and hope you enjoy showing it off! | | | | | |
Justice is a Collective Effort.
At the heart of Berkeley Law’s commitment to justice, the Clinical Program continues to stand out as a place where learning meets purpose. Over the past year, our 15 clinics — driven by the dedication and work of our students, faculty, and staff — deepened their impact in the East Bay, across the country, and around the world.
Read the Clinical Program’s 2024-25 Annual Report >
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