Law professor
earns Fulbright scholarship
UNM
Associate Professor of Law Jennifer Moore has received a Fulbright
scholarship to Tanzania, Africa, for 2002-03.
Moore will
teach in the area of refugee law and comparative human rights
at the University of Dar es Salaam Faculty of Law.
At the
Universitys Center for the Study of Forced Migration she
will research how the Tanzanian legal system incorporates international
refugee and human rights law. In a lot of ways what we
consider here in the United States to be major challenges can
be put into perspective by what we see in other parts of the
world, Moore said, noting severe immigration statistics
in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Although
this will be her first trip to Tanzania, her ties to African
nations are long-standing and date back to infancy. A Tanzanian
friend of Moores father is her godfather. In the early
1980s, while majoring in anthropology at Amherst College, she
spent six months in Kenya studying, traveling and working for
an economic development agency.
Unfortunately,
I was unable to make a planned trip to Dar es Salaam due to
the closed border between the two countries at that time. I
have been thinking about returning to the region ever since,
Moore said.
After graduating
from Harvard Law School in 1987, Moore joined the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and served as an associate
protection officer in Conakry, Guinea, from 1991-93 and
in Washington, D.C., from 1993-94. While working for the
U.N. in Washington, she went on a short mission to Rwanda in
1994 to help monitor the repatriation of refugees to Gisenyi
and visited border crossings into the former Zaire and Uganda.
She served
as a visiting professor at two law schools before coming to
UNM in 1995. In 2001, at a refugee protection conference in
Johannesburg, South Africa, Moore presented a paper on persecution
by non-state agents. There she met the director of University
of Dar es Salaams Center for the Study of Forced Migration.
The two then corresponded about the possibility of Moore visiting.
She said
while at the center, she would like to focus her research on
the development of Tanzanian asylum law and policy. She is interested
in legislation formalizing obligations to asylum seekers and
refugees and how those laws are applied in the current political
and social climate.
Moores
experience with the U.N. has a direct affect on students, especially
those motivated to do international work, she says. Working
with Moore through the UNM Clinical Law Program, several of
her students are conducting in-depth research that can be used
to strengthen asylum claims.
Topics
include the status of Palestinians in Middle Eastern countries;
religious persecution, as it is understood by the U.S. courts
as a basis to grant asylum; and trafficking in women for forced
prosecution as a form of persecution. A number of her students
are also working with battered women at Catholic Charities to
help them obtain permanent legal residency in the U.S.
Moore begins
her Fulbright to Tanzania in October, a five-month project.