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In 1992, when Sarah Cleveland was a third-year law student at Yale, she teamed up with classmates and professors to sue the U.S. government on an issue that sounds eerily like something from today's headlines: Do foreign detainees at the Guantanamo Naval Base deserve the same constitutional protections as American citizens? The case was brought on behalf of Haitian refugees who had sought political asylum in the U.S. after a military coup overthrew the Haitian government. The refugees who were granted asylum but tested positive for HIV, however, were detained indefinitely at Guantanamo. In early summer 2003, a federal judge ruled the detention unconstitutional, allowing them entrance into the U.S. at last. Quite a high-profile case for a lawyer in the making—and Cleveland's introduction to international human rights law.

"Being involved in that litigation," she said, "showed me the power of what international law can and cannot do on behalf of people."

Now a noted legal expert on the subject, Cleveland continues to fight such battles, more often from the classroom than the courtroom, as the Louis Henkin Professor of Human and Constitutional Rights and faculty co-director of the Human Rights Institute at the law school. Most of Cleveland's scholarly work is on the intersection, and sometimes the fault line, between international law and domestic law. Coming almost full circle, Cleveland examines the relationship between international law and the concept of extraterritorial application of the U.S. Constitution, and how constitutional rights should apply abroad.

One area of interest is the rights of foreign nationals, who are typically at a legal disadvantage. "They are a community that has no political voice or clout," she said, "and traditionally, they are a group for whom legal protection often breaks down. That's what I want to remedy." She participated in efforts to free so-called Mariel Cubans who were indefinitely detained in the U.S. for a decade or more, and worked to develop international legal protections for migrant workers.

For the Human Rights Institute, Cleveland oversees scholarly efforts and programs with faculty co-director Peter Rosenblum, who is also a professor of human rights law. The institute was founded by Columbia professor Louis Henkin in 1998 "to be the focal point of human rights activities at the law school," said Cleveland, "and to create a bridge between the law school and human rights work outside the University." It has done so by forming partnerships with groups like the American Civil Liberties Union or through its own Bringing Human Rights Home Lawyers Network, a group of domestic legal advocates who push for U.S. compliance with international human rights law.

Formerly the Marrs McLean Professor in Law at the University of Texas, where she received the Excellence in Teaching Award, Cleveland's past scholarship has explored the use of U.S. economic sanctions to promote human rights compliance abroad, as well as the historical role of international law in U.S. constitutional interpretation, an issue on which she has testified before Congress. She is currently co-authoring the second edition of Louis Henkin's Human Rights casebook, due out in 2009.

Q. As faculty co-director of the institute, what matters to you the most right now?

Across the spectrum of projects that the Human Rights Institute is involved in, we are trying to challenge traditional ways that human rights have been thought to be useful. For example, through our project on Human Rights in the United States, we are attempting to demonstrate that human rights are relevant to what happens here within the United States, that they're not something that simply happens "out there." The focus on human rights in the United States is a flagship project of the institute and is one of Columbia Law School's distinctive contributions to the study and practice of human rights. In our project on Human Rights and the Global Economy, we are reconceiving human rights as a field that is concerned with issues of anti-corruption, transparency and democracy in international mining contracts. In 2008, human rights is no longer only about things like torture and extrajudicial killing. We're very interested in pushing the envelope on how human rights law and advocacy are conceptualized.

Q. What are some of the projects the institute is currently working on?

Our project on National Security and Human Rights established the Working Group on Detention Without Trial this past summer. The working group is comprised of prominent legal academics and others with expertise on the law and policy of detention, and is working on the question of what position the new administration should adopt regarding the detention of terrorism suspects, including persons detained at Guantanamo. Members of the working group submitted testimony on this issue to the Senate Judiciary Committee this fall and have submitted a position paper to President-Elect Obama's transition team. On the clinical side, the Human Rights Clinic is pursuing a major inquest under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain all the information they can about how decisions are made by the government to accept "diplomatic assurances" when people are returned to countries where they may be subjected to torture. Very little is known about U.S. practices in this area, and the clinical project is thus a very important effort to establish transparency and accountability.

Q. How have you participated in the legal fight over prisoner rights at Guantanamo Bay?

Most of the work I've done around Guantanamo has involved not international law, but the application of U.S. constitutional law. I work a lot on extraterritorial application of the U.S. Constitution and the relationship between constitutional doctrine and international law. Guantanamo has obviously been a focus of the struggle over whether or not the Constitution applies outside the territory of the United States and if so, under what circumstances and to whom. We filed an amicus brief [in the Boumediene v. Bush case] arguing that the habeas corpus provisions of the Constitution should apply to Guantanamo detainees and pleasantly the Supreme Court agreed. They didn't cite our brief so I can't claim credit, but we like to think it had some influence.

Q. You helped draft a labor code for post-Taliban Afghanistan. What was that like?

That was complicated. We were given a copy of the pre-Taliban labor code of Afghanistan, which was essentially a Soviet-era document, and asked to try to come up with an employment code that would satisfy fundamental international labor standards and also be attractive to foreign investment. One of the challenges was that the Afghan labor code was riddled with references to traditional employment practices. For example, the employer was supposed to provide a hot lunch for the worker every day. Under the Afghan labor code, it was also essentially impossible to fire someone for any reason. One of the main problems we struggled with was how to create a workable enforcement mechanism in a country that had no real functioning legal or judicial system. So we tried to craft a plan for essentially arbitrating labor disputes. I don't know that Afghanistan ever adopted this labor code.

Q. What makes Columbia's human rights program stand out?

[University Professor Emeritus] Louis Henkin built the field of human rights as an area of legal study and built the study of human rights at Columbia before any other school. Part of his vision was that human rights should be a subject of scholarly inquiry not only at the law school, but in the University as a whole. Henkin believed in the interdisciplinary study of human rights, and so he founded the Center for the Study of Human Rights at the University level two decades before he established the Human Rights Institute.

Q. Do you think people are generally aware of their human rights or when those rights are being violated?

I don't think people necessarily know that there is a treaty out there that says "you have the right not to be treated in a particular way," but I think that people do have a sense of basic human dignity and what it means to be treated like a human being. And that's really what human rights are all about.

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