The day after receiving the International Nuremberg Human Rights Award 2025, the representatives of Parents Circle – Families Forum, Laila AlSheikh and Robi Damelin, visited us. The evening was marked by moving testimonies, honest dialogue, and deep reflection on what reconciliation can look like in the face of violence and loss.

In 2013, a family from the small Pacific Island country of Kiribati left their home in Tarawa, Kiribati and headed to New Zealand. Ioane Teitiota and his family became the first to apply for refugee status due to the impacts of climate change – stating that climate change had created unsuitable living conditions in Kiribati and had devastated the island so much that it was no longer safe for them to live there. A primary concern of Teitiota and other I-Kiribati is sea level rise, seeing as the islands of Kiribati sit only 2 – 3 meters above sea level. Kiribati is just one country and community out of many impacted by climate change in this way. The story of Kiribati is familiar in nearby islands, including Tuvalu, Fiji, Tonga, and others. The Pacific islands make up only 0.03% of global emissions, yet they continue to bear the brunt of the impacts, and they remain as one region in the forefront of the climate crisis. In turn, people are displaced from their communities either by force or necessity – and this phenomenon is not unique to the Pacific.

Michael Krennerich’s book “Human Rights Politics. An introduction” has just been published – also available as Open Access.

The book introduces the diversity of topics, actors, and institutions involved in human rights politics and shows how political science and related disciplines can help to organize the field of research and (more) systematically describe and examine the complex reality of human rights politics.

This question is examined by Chilean laywer Felipe Téllez, who draws the conclusion that the law which imposes the restriction of access needs to be changed, at least in order to grant judicial bodies access to relevant information in order to help with their investigations.

The book “Sources of Solidarity” offers a profound introduction to the foundations of human rights. The author Heiner Bielefeldt is member of the NMRZ and chair of human rights and human rights politics at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg.

Hedme Castro, director of the human rights organization ACI-PARTICIPA in Honduras was a guest of the Nuremberg Human Rights Center (NMRZ) from March to September as part of the ESI (Elisabeth Selbert Initiative) protection program for persecuted human rights defenders. Now her house has been burned down. We stand in solidarity with our friend Hemde and have opened a donation account, so that she can find a sace place to stay.

Social networks have created new communication channels, but they are also a breeding ground of sexist rhetoric and gender specific desinformation about female candidates and politicians. With the upcoming federal elections in Germany, the subject is currently especially important and visible. This article analyzes common attacks against women with examples from Germany and the US.

The year 2019 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In post-conflict settings, every human right, from social and economic rights like access to food, water, and housing, to civil and political rights, can be impacted. Solutions to each of these challenges will need to be addressed within the unique historical context and local socio-political environment, with the most vulnerable deserving special attention and participation in the process. Integrating a gender-mainstreaming approach to reconstruction can inform the understanding of these persistent themes and mitigate some of the issues in post-conflict settings.

The purpose of this article is to elaborate on the need for, and the prospect of, establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the former Yugoslavia. The ratio for such a commission has much to do with the failings of the Yugoslav Tribunal to realize its didactic purposes to its fullest potential, a consequence of anti-Tribunal propaganda and the inability to generate a form of truth that would serve as an adequate basis for post-conflict reconciliation. Following the outlining of these shortcomings, this paper shall assess some of the past and more recent attempts aimed towards the formation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission within the former Yugoslav states.