Hoyas for Human Rights (HfHR), a Georgetown student organization facilitating discussions on international humanitarian issues, will host its inaugural Human Rights Summit March 31, partnering with several on-campus clubs and associations to raise awareness for global human rights, from worker’s rights to extrajudicial punishment. 

HfHR collaborated with Lauinger Library, the Cawley Career Education Center, the John Main Center, student publications including The Hoya and The Georgetown Voice and a diverse group of clubs to hold 18 events across campus. During the summit, students will be able to discuss human rights careers in the Cawley Career Center, attend a group mediation or hear from a panel on environmental racism.

The planning process for the summit prioritized partnerships with other activist student organizations and integrating human rights into an across-campus event, rather than bringing in speakers for one central event, according to HfHR co-founder Gwyneth Murphy (SFS ’23, GRD ’24).

“Partnerships for the summit were so critical because there’s already work being done across all kinds of human rights areas on campus; it’s just not labeled that way,” Murphy said. “We wanted to just bring together the people that are already doing that work and highlight the great things that they’re already doing.”

The summit will involve representatives from 12 student clubs, two student publications, five university-run student centers and Lauinger Library.  

Murphy said HfHR organizers were surprised by partner clubs’ enthusiasm about participating in the summit.

“We’ve just been overwhelmed by the amount of support that we’ve had and the number of organizations that want to participate, especially for a brand new organization,” Murphy said. “I could see that this felt like an exciting opportunity to them as much as it felt like an exciting opportunity to us.”

Riley Swain (SFS ’25), HfHR’s head of LGBTQ+ issues and gender-based violence, said the summit aims to showcase each participating organization’s contribution to on-campus conversations on human rights.

“Our partnership organizations each contribute a unique perspective on a multitude of human rights issues as well as how to get involved with them, so the summit presents a rare opportunity for these perspectives to be brought together,” Swain wrote to The Hoya. 

The summit will provide an accessible way for students to learn about human rights, Rebecca Cohn (CAS ’25), HfHR’s head of reproductive justice issues.

“Regardless of your interests, every person on campus probably cares about at least one human rights issue, and I think the Summit provides an entrypoint for students into human rights work through already established commitments or interests,” Cohn wrote to The Hoya. 

Murphy and Melissa Deng (SFS ’23) founded HfHR last summer, as Murphy said they felt Georgetown needed a student organization that could voice support for human rights and uplift the work of existing clubs in the space.

“It shocked me that we didn’t have any human rights organization at Georgetown up to this point,” Murphy told The Hoya. “We’re a very socially minded institution, with social organizations, and people deal with human rights, but there’s never been an explicit human rights organization.”

Deng said the club’s primary mission is to support existing advocacy efforts at Georgetown and spotlight human rights worldwide.

“We exist to build off the existing human rights work that is already being done on campus,” Deng said in an interview with The Hoya. “We’re mostly a coalition builder. So our mission revolves around creating this inclusive space for meaningful discussion and mobilization around human rights issues, both on campus and around the world.”

The HfHR leadership also hopes to use the summit as an opportunity to bring attention to the absence of dialogue on human rights on campus prior to the club’s founding, according to Deng. 

“Our biggest hope is just to get more people involved in human rights discourse more broadly and then also to get our name out and show that this absence of a human rights summit, the fact that there was no Hoyas for Human Rights before this year, is definitely indicative of a pattern that we need to change,” Deng said.