Carr-Ryan Center Annual Report 2024-25

During the 2024–25 academic year, humanity’s commitment to justice and dignity faced extraordinary challenges and urgent calls to action, making the work of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights both more vulnerable and more vital. The war in Gaza continued to exact a significant toll on civilians, disrupting lives, displacing families, and testing the limits of international humanitarian law and global solidarity. There is a vital debate going on about whether at this stage the operations of the Israeli military in Gaza should count as genocide. Violence escalated again in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, and the Tigray region of Ethiopia, as did the bombardment of Ukraine. For Putin, no amount of human sacrifice seems too big in pursuit of his goals. We witnessed alarming rollbacks of LGBTQI+ rights in several regions, including the United States, where legislative crackdowns and rising intolerance increasingly threatened the safety and freedoms of queer communities. Ongoing migration and refugee crises underscored the harsh reality that large numbers of people are still forced to flee violence, persecution, and climate shocks, only to encounter ever more exclusionary borders. The deepening impacts of climate change further amplified these crises, inflicting devastation on already vulnerable communities, particularly Indigenous peoples whose survival is intimately connected to the health of their lands and ecosystems. Across continents, civic space and democratic norms continued to erode, narrowing the ability of voices to speak truth to power, defend human rights, and hold institutions accountable.

Overall, the second Trump administration has considerably reduced the role of human rights in foreign policy, creating an enormous challenge for those of us who do think human rights must be an essential ingredient to foreign policy, and certainly American foreign policy. The whole point of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was to make sure that all human beings have certain protections and can enjoy a certain standard of living—and for the pursuit of those goals to be a globally shared priority. For decades, the United States was committed to this goal, admittedly not consistently and with different levels of urgency across administrations. But the complete removal of human rights in American foreign policy creates a new reality altogether, as does the increasingly adversarial approach to some of America’s longest-standing allies. Human rights and other concerns captured under “safety” have also been omitted from the new American AI Action Plan.

Even closer to home, the change in presidential administration has introduced unprecedented challenges for Harvard and the Center, underscoring the importance of our mission now more than ever. In the early stage of this conflict between Harvard and the administration we were fortunate enough to receive a transformative gift of $10m for the center’s endowment from longtime supporter and Chair Emeritus of our Advisory Board, the incomparable Vincent (Vin) Ryan. In recognition of this gift, our center was renamed the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights. This gift enables us to deepen our engagement with critical global human rights issues—from digital surveillance and democratic resilience to LGBTQI+ rights, racial justice, and the historical trajectory of human rights. You can read more detail about these specific developments in this report, but through our research and programming, the Center has advanced our dual mission: shaping the next generation of leaders in human rights policy and practice, while providing timely, policy-relevant thought leadership to audiences around the world. It is not an overstatement to say that Vin’s generous gift has ensured that human rights remain central to the work of Harvard Kennedy School for the long term. While much more work remains to be done to raise funds for professorships in the human rights domain and for the work done in our various programs, the combination of Greg Carr’s original gift with Vin Ryan’s recent gift means that the organizational skeleton of our human rights center will be in place in perpetuity.

The successes of the past year would not have been possible without the dedication of the entire Carr-Ryan community. Our faculty, fellows, students, staff, advisors, and benefactors each contribute meaningfully and generously to the Center’s work and to the advancement of human rights worldwide. We are sincerely grateful for your continued engagement and hope you will join with us again in the year ahead.