Please join us for a Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies External Speaker (CLALSES) Series with Yuri Alexander Romaña Rivas (McGill University) who will discuss how the Inter American Commission and the Court have used their different mechanisms to tackle issues of environmental rights and climate change, with a specific focus on racialized or marginalized communities in the Americas. Hosted by CLALS Associate Director Cathy Bartch.
Yuri Alexander Romaña-Rivas, an Afro-Colombian lawyer, is a current doctoral (Ph.D.) candidate in the Comparative Law concentration of the Doctor of Civil Law (DCL-Comparative Law) program at McGill’s Faculty of Law and an O’Brien Fellow at the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism.
He is a recipient of the 2022 National Scholarship Vanier awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Yuri also received the 2022 John Peters Humphrey Fellowship in International Human Rights or International Organization, awarded by the Canadian Council on International Law (CCIL).
Yuri holds a Master of Laws (LLM) in International Law and Legal Studies from American University, Washington College of Law, in Washington, DC, where he studied on a Fulbright Scholarship. He obtained his Law degree (LLB) at the “Diego Luis Córdoba” Technological University of Chocó (U.T.CH) in Colombia.
Yuri has significant legal experience in International Human Rights Law and transitional justice mechanisms. He is currently the co-director of the McGill Transnational Justice Clinic, a hub for legal research, analysis and drafting affiliated with the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism. Between 2018 and 2021, he worked as a specialized lawyer at the Chamber for Amnesty and Pardon of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (“JEP” in Spanish) in Colombia, a transitional justice tribunal established in 2018 as a result of the 2016-Peace Agreements between the Colombian Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia- People’s Army (“FARC-EP” in Spanish) to investigate, prosecute and adjudicate the most serious crimes committed in the context of the more than 50-year armed conflict in Colombia. Previously, Yuri worked for more than five years as a Human Rights Specialist at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an autonomous international human rights body of the Organization of American States (OAS) based in Washington, D.C, where he worked within the Precautionary Measures Mechanism and the Individual Petitions and Cases System.
Additionally, Yuri has conducted research and published on various human rights topics, including transitional justice, structural racism, and due process guarantees under International Human Rights Law.