Noam Schimmel

Associate Fellow, Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, McGill University
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About Noam

Schimmel’s interests are in the politics, ethics, and practice of international human rights law and humanitarian aid, global governance and the United Nations, healthcare policy and healthcare rights in the United States and globally, and development and the tensions and synergies between social, economic, cultural, political, and civil rights, their protection and fulfillment. His research and publications are interdisciplinary in nature incorporating political science and public policy, international human rights law, development studies, communication, and ethics. His human rights publications address a wide range of human rights issues including the rights and welfare of children, indigenous people, and survivors of genocide, healthcare rights, human rights education, and the media and human rights. He has a particular interest in the human rights responsibilities of non-governmental organizations and in efforts of non-governmental organizations and agencies regulating them to improve the ethics and outcomes of their policies and programs.  

In the News

"The Human Rights Law Responsibilities of NGOs," Noam Schimmel, Oxford Human Rights Hub, March 20, 2015.
"Attributive Justice," Noam Schimmel, Times of Higher Education, January 26, 2012.
"Remembering the Survivors of Genocide in Rwanda," Noam Schimmel, Dissent, May 4, 2011.
"Independence Day in Africa a Time to Take Stock of America," Noam Schimmel, Baltimore Sun, July 4, 2008.

Publications

"The International Human Rights Responsibilities of Non-Governmental Organizations: A Case Study of the Right to Reparative Justice in Rwanda" (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

Presents a case study of the right to restorative justice in Rwanda.

"American Presidential Rhetoric Justifying Healthcare Reform: Continuity, Change and Contested Values from Truman to Obama" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed by the four Democratic presidents, Truman, Johnson, Clinton and Obama, who tried to expand access to and affordability of healthcare in the United States.

"The Place of Human Rights in American Efforts to Expand and Universalize Healthcare" Human Rights Review 14, no. 1 (2013): 1-29.

Explores the very limited cases historically in the twentieth century when human rights were used in American policy debate as a defending principle for the provision of government-guaranteed universal healthcare.

"The Moral Case for Restorative Justice as a Corollary of the Responsibility to Protect: A Rwandan Case Study of the Insufficiency of Impact of Retributive Justice on the Rights and Well-Being of Genocide Survivors" Journal of Human Rights 11, no. 2 (2012): 161-188.

Analyzes how the current framework of retributive justice pursued by the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda fails to respect the human rights and to enable the well-being of Rwandan genocide survivors.

"An Invisible Genocide: How the Western Media Failed to Report the 1994 Rwandan Genocide of the Tutsis and Why" International Journal of Human Rights 15, no. 7 (2011): 1125-1135.

Analyses current academic literature examining the reporting of the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi in 1994 in the American and European media. It shows how the genocide was mischaracterised as a ‘tribal war’ and an act of spontaneous violence and primordial hatred, rather than being accurately reported as a meticulously planned and implemented political project of ethnic extermination.

"Indigenous Education and Human Rights" The International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 14, no. 4 (2007): 425-453.

Discusses how the right to an education that is consonant with and draws upon the culture and language of indigenous peoples is a human right which is too often overlooked by governments when they develop and implement programs whose purported goals are to improve the social, economic and political status of these peoples.