Greetings again from Belgium! As our tired group made their way back from the beautiful and (too) sunny Paris to the comfortable familiarity of Brussels, we refocused our minds from discussions of foreign security matters and EU institutional concepts towards an exploration of international human rights in the context of European nations.

We welcomed Dr. Mikulas Fabry to Belgium, who is graciously imparting his expertise in ethics and international affairs through a crash course on the nature of international human rights policy and its omnipresent impact on world affairs. We began by discussing current issues concerning the European continent, including the migration of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa into EU countries, Hungary’s reconsideration of capital punishment, and ongoing war crimes occurring in the Gaza Strip. There are numerous obstacles to achieving peace in the current international system, and many center around the lack of effective enforcement mechanisms for human rights treaties, which stem from an inability of national governments and international institutions to concretely define the terms of human rights debates.

Dr. Fabry lead us through a comprehensive definition of human rights, and I especially appreciated our discussion on how human rights were developed from natural law, which constitutes an ancient moral theory that nature contains objective moral standards that are accessible to all people by virtue of their reasoning. A world that is constantly evolving and entrenched in cultural relativism contests natural law, and by extension, human rights protections. This clash between what a culture deems is acceptable for those involved and what should naturally be accessible to all peoples is still relevant in contemporary human rights conflicts.

Our afternoon lecture centered around various international institutions that contribute to the global human rights debate, including the various institutions from the United Nations and the European Union specifically. These institutions have evolved and adapted to address human rights concerns in the past, and are continuing to develop in response to recent crises such as the migration problems and rising tension in the Middle East.

The general conclusions reached after a comprehensive and engaging six hour discussion were that unsympathetic governments hinder the operability of human rights machinery on both the regional and global level, and that sympathetic governments benefit greatly from external reviews of their practices because those reviews establish a good reputation on the global stage. All of us received a solid (but firehose) grounding in human rights theory and are ready to discuss more about the International Criminal Court and other details regarding human rights institutions tomorrow.

We all look forward to using the knowledge we gained from today’s lectures and will gain from tomorrow’s as we prepare to embark to The Hague, Berlin, and Kraków in order to become truly immersed in current human rights issues through relevant site visits!

Omaha Beach, Normandy

Walking along Omaha beach opened up a sea of emotions I can’t describe. Over 2000 young men were cut down in their prime among a hail of bullets on the very beaches that I walked along. They were my age, just getting on with their lives, and many of them never made it off of the sand.
As I walked along the beach, with children playing and dogs chasing sea gulls along the waters’ edge, I noticed that right along the sea line was a line of beautiful blue shells. They stretched along the beach for as far as I could see, and when I picked one up it crumbled in my hand.
I didn’t know what else to do when I thought about the reflections for this blog post, but I felt inspired to write. Now I am no poet, but I tried to capture what I felt when I contemplated that day. The young men that died that day were beautiful, and now they are remembered as eternally young. This is what I came up with to try to describe how I felt.

Broken Shells

they were washed by the waves,
and smashed against the shore,
what once were beautiful shells,
are whole now no more.

look down and pick one up;
feel the fragility, the life!
from afar a line of thousands
but close one sees the strife.

they flooded the beach that June,
died by dozens, then droves,
now they lay among the cliffs,
lovely shells in eternal homes.

so travel West, and soon.
go get in your car and drive
stand on the shore and breathe in the salt,
and know that you are alive.

we were washed by the waves,
and saved by the shore.
these beautiful, broken shells,
will be remembered forevermore.

Despite only being in the city for a few days, I feel that many of us have already developed some sort of routine to start our days in Paris – which could be to wake up, get dressed, and go to the bakery across the street for breakfast or to roll out of bed and run to the lobby just in time to make it to the metro.

We are all slowly adjusting to a new, much larger city and simultaneously bursting with excitement and wilting with exhaustion. These past few days have been very busy for us as a class and though we finished with our site visit earlier than usual today, I know that the urge to go out and explore the city infected all of us and that the majority of the group went out to see the wonders of Paris (the 90 degree weather not stopping us).

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