In Season 15, Episode 6 of The Explainer podcast, human rights law scholar Professor Irwin Stotzky talks about the crisis in Haiti and applies a historical lens to the island's troubles. In a capital nearly entirely controlled by gangs, hundreds of Haitians are now trying to return to neighborhoods that have become ghost towns, forced to choose between the warnings of the police and the assurances of the armed groups who destroyed their lives. Listen to the podcast here.
Stotzky was the founder and served as the director of the University of Miami Center for the Study of Human Rights from 1993-2010. For over four decades, he has represented Haitian and other refugees on constitutional and human rights issues in many cases, including several cases in the United States Supreme Court. He has served as an adviser to the Alfonsin regime in Argentina on what steps to take, including human rights trials, against those who committed massive human rights abuses during the so-called "dirty war." For many years, he served as an attorney and adviser to the first democratically elected president in the history of Haiti, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and as an adviser to President Renè Preval's administration.
Stotzky has published numerous articles and books on democracy and human rights, criminal law and procedure, and the role of the judiciary in the transition to democracy. He teaches in the areas of constitutional law and theory, criminal procedure, immigration law, and philosophy. He has received human rights awards from the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the Haitian Refugee Center for his representation of refugees in a series of cases before the United States Supreme Court and his human rights work abroad. For his involvement in investigating human rights abuses worldwide and his scholarship, he received the Inter-American Law Review's 1997 Lawyer of the Americas award.
