Please join us Wednesday, January 27th 2016 from 12:25pm-1:25pm in Carwein Auditorium for “Unfinished Sentences: Seeking Justice in El Salvador”
Unfinished Sentences will address the human rights situation in El Salvador today, in particular the attempt by human rights groups, supported by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights (UWCHR), to hold accountable perpetrators of atrocities committed by government and militia forces in the 1980s civil war. Following the CIA’s refusal to release information relevant to these cases, UWCHR sued the CIA under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to release the requested documents. The talk discusses the challenges facing the Center in this effort and the need for greater informational transparency versus government secrecy as well as the center’s recent conference “Access to Information as a Human Right.”
Angelina Snodgrass Godoy is a sociologist by training (MA and PhD, UC Berkeley; BA Harvard) whose research focuses on human rights in Latin America. She has previous worked for Amnesty International and other human rights organizations. At the University of Washington, Professor Godoy serves as Helen H. Jackson Endowed Chair in Human Rights and founding Director of the Center for Human Rights. The UWCHR is an interdisciplinary center that promotes teaching, research, and engagement across the curriculum in all three UW campuses, and in partnership with local, national, and international organizations actively working for human rights. Professor Godoy is the author of two books published by Stanford University Press Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America (2006) and Of Medicines and Markets: Intellectual Property and Human Rights in the Free Trade Era (2013). She is also the proud recipient of the University of Washington’s 2014 Outstanding Public Service Award.
Emily Williard is a PhD student at the Jackson School of International Studies, focusing her research on women’s involvement in armed groups in Central America. She is a research assistant for the Unfinished Sentences project at the UW Center for Human Rights. Previously she worked as a research associate at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. specializing in analyzing declassified documents and using the FOIA.
Sponsored by UWT Associates of the Center of Human Rights and the Division of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs.