The UCCHRE Human Rights in Higher Education Award

The first international award in human rights education, the Human Rights in Higher Education Award, promotes work that embodies human rights principles in teaching, learning, research, policies, and practices. It recognizes an individual, organization, initiative, or publication for its outstanding contribution to human rights education. The University and College Consortium for Human Rights Education works to further human rights learning, research, policy, and practices within and across university and college communities through collaboration.

The selection process takes place in November, but you may submit a nomination at any time here.

2025 Award

Dr. William Paul Simmons, s a Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Founder of the online Human Rights Practice Program at the University of Arizona. Dr. Simmons’s research is highly interdisciplinary; using theoretical, legal, and empirical approaches to advance human rights for marginalized populations around the globe. His books include Joyful Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Human Rights Law and the Marginalized Other (Cambridge UP, 2011), An-archy and Justice: An Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas’ Political Thought (Lexington, 2003). He has conducted ethnographic research on sexual violence against migrant women and children and published articles and a book chapter exploring legal remedies for the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

His articles have appeared in such journals as; Perspectives on Politics, DuBois Review, Journal of Human Rights, International Journal of Feminist Politics, International Migration Review, Violence Against Women, Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal, The Journal of International Human Rights, Social Science Quarterly, andPhilosophy and Social Criticism. He has served as a consultant on human rights and social justice issues in The Gambia, Niger, Nigeria, Bangladesh, China, Mexico, and the United States.

2024 Award

Dr. Cher Weixia Chen is an Associate Professor in the School of Integrative Studies at George Mason University. She is the founder of the Human Rights and Global Justice Initiative, a Senior Scholar at the Center for the Advancement of Well-Being, and a Faculty Fellow with the Institute for a Sustainable Earth. Dr. Chen has been instrumental in creating the undergraduate Social Justice and Human Rights concentration, the Social Justice and Human Rights minor, and the MAIS Social Justice and Human Rights concentration, all of which have grown significantly over time. She also teaches and coordinates courses spanning International Studies, Legal Studies, and Social Justice and Human Rights. Dr. Chen’s research focuses on the rights of marginalized groups, including women and indigenous peoples, the well-being of social justice and human rights activists, and international and comparative legal studies. Her scholarship in human rights education includes her co-authored books International Human Rights: A Survey (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Activism, Burnout, and Community in Higher Education: Narratives of College Student Activists (Routledge, 2025), Dr. Chen also led a collaborative project with scholars and educators from over ten countries, resulting in the edited volume, Interdisciplinary Human Rights in the Global Curriculum (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Her publications include Compliance and Compromise: The Jurisprudence of Gender Pay Equity (Brill/Martinus Nijhoff, 2011), Activism, Burnout, and Community in Higher Education: Narratives of College Student Activists (Routledge, 2025).

2023 Award

Dr. Anja Mihr, PhD, is a political scientist, consultant, senior lecturer, writer and researcher for International Human Rights Law, Governance, Public Policy, and Transitional Justice/Transitology focusing on Eurasia. She is the Founder and Program Director of the Center on Governance through Human Rights at the Berlin Governance Platform in Berlin, Germany. She has held professorships at OSCE Academy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, at the Willy-Brandt School of Public Policy, Erfurt University, Germany, and the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM), University of Utrecht, Netherlands.

In 2023, Anja launched the Central Asia Regional Master in Liberal Arts Programme for Human Rights and Sustainability (MAHRS) and which she is supervising at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. It is the 8th regional MA Program of the Global Campus for Human Rights in Venice. Mihr has been Head of the Rule of Law department at The Hague Institute for Global Justice and carried out several Visiting Professorships for Human Rights and Public Policy, such as at Peking University Law School in China together with the Raoul Wallenberg Research Institute on Human Rights, Lund University in 2008 as well as at SIPA, Columbia University in New York. 2006-2008, she was the European Program Director for the European MA Degree in Human Rights and Democratization (E.MA) at the European Inter-University Center for Human Rights in Venice (EIUC), Italy. She received her Ph.D. in Political Sciences from the Free University in Berlin, Germany, in 2001. She teaches international human rights law, transitional justice, & transitology public policy, democracy theories, and ‘glocal’ governance with an interdisciplinary approach to international and domestic politics. Click here to learn more.

2022 Award

Dr. Micheline Ishay is a political scientist known for her work in political theory, international relations, human rights, foreign policy, and the Middle East. She is Professor of International Studies and Human Rights at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. She was named University of Denver Distinguished Scholar. She was the founding director of Korbel’s International Human Rights Program, leading it for almost two decades as it became one of the country’s top graduate programs in human rights. She is an affiliate faculty member with the Center for Middle East Studies, was Executive Director of the Center on Rights Development, and serves as Vice Director of the International Council for Diplomacy and Dialogue (Paris). Click here to learn more..

2021 Award

The recipients for 2021 are two distinguished journals in the field: the Human Rights Education Review and the International Journal of Human Rights Education. As editors-in-chief, Audrey Osler, Professor of Education at University of South-Eastern Norway, and Monisha Bajaj, Professor of International and Multicultural Education at the University of San Francisco, accept the award on behalf of their respective publications.

Founded within a year of each other (2018 and 2017 respectively), the Human Rights Education Review and the International Journal of Human Rights Education mark the coming of age of human rights education as a scholarly field. Each provides an international forum for the exchange of research and experiences as well as a space for scholars, young and old, to reach the growing global audience for human rights education in both academia and the world of human rights activism.

In their content and the diversity of their contributors, both journals reflect the international nature of human rights education. Both offer peer-reviewed articles and reviews of the highest quality; both are open source and accessible to individuals outside the academy; both reflect the broad range of applications encompassed by human rights education, including formal, popular, and values education; and HRE in post-colonial, post-conflict, minority, and oppressed communities globally.

Whether an academic, activist, or practitioner, everyone working the field of HRE has benefited from these two journals. They have become essential sources for knowing what’s going on in the field: new ideas, new perspectives, new voices, and new publications. They inspire young scholars to know that their research has a potential international point of publication. It keeps established human rights educators in touch with developments in the field. These journals offer the strongest evidence that HRE is a serious scholarly endeavor and holds out to students the possibility of HRE as a life’s career.

Human Rights Education Review

Published by the University of South-Eastern Norway, the Human Rights Education Review (HRER) is dedicated to an examination of human rights education theory, philosophy, policy, and praxis. It particularly welcomes contributions at the intersection of human rights and diversity studies in education and covers all levels of education, from early childhood through to higher education, professional education and lifelong learning. With the Convenors of the WERA International Research Network on Human Rights Education, the Review sponsors a research webinar series that introduces human rights education to the wider educational research community and presents a range of perspectives on research.

International Journal of Human Rights Education

International Journal of Human Rights Education is committed to open-access and online diffusion of leading research in the field in order to democratize access to scholarship. It publishes articles that foster discussions on theories, models, concepts, practices, and empirical research on human rights education in diverse educational, sociopolitical, and cultural settings. The journal seeks to link theory to praxis as well as the emergence of new theories from grounded engagements in the field. Recent issues have focused on significant these such as Human Rights Education and Black Liberation (Volume 5, Issue 1, 2021), Decolonial Human Rights and Peace Education: Recognizing and Re-envisioning Radical Praxes (Volume 4, Issue 1, 2020), and Indigenous Women in Research: Global Conversations on Indigeneity, Rights, and Education (Volume 3, Issue 1, 2019).