Tackling Corruption as a Human Rights Violation with Naomi Roht-Arriaza

The Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, in collaboration with the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law, invites you to a critical discussion on the evolving challenge of grand corruption—the systemic, top-down misappropriation of public resources that undermines governance and human rights worldwide. The event features author Naomi Roht-Arriaza discussing her timely book, which explores how new anti-corruption movements, particularly in Latin America, are shifting focus to center human rights, justice for victims, and the potential for reparations.

Professor Roht-Arriaza will be joined by panelists Omar Gomez, Nikki Reisch, and Debadatta Bose for a conversation moderated by Professor Laurel Fletcher. Biographies of all panel members are coming soon.

Lunch will be served inside of Room 170 starting at 12:50 PM. RSVPs will be prioritized.

Speaker Bios

Naomi Roht-Arriaza, , Author, Distinguished Professor of Law (emerita), University of California Law, San Francisco

Professor Naomi Roht-Arriaza grew up in New York and Latin America, including stints in Chile, Guatemala and Costa Rica. She earned a B.A. from UC Berkeley, a M.A. from the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy (formerly the Graduate School of Public Policy), and a J.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). Professor Roht-Arriaza has worked as an immigration paralegal, an organizer, and a teacher for a nonprofit focused on corporate accountability. After graduating from law school, she clerked for Judge James Browning of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. During 1991 to 1992, Professor Roht-Arriaza was the first Riesenfeld Fellow in International Law and Organizations at UC Berkeley School of Law.

Professor Roht-Arriaza is the author of The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights (2005) and Impunity and Human Rights in International Law and Practice (1995), and coeditor of Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Truth versus Justice. She is a coauthor on The International Legal System: Cases and Materials (6th Ed.) with Mary Ellen O’Connell and Dick Scott (Foundation Press 2010). She continues to write on accountability, both state and corporate, for human rights violations as well as on other human rights, international criminal law and global environmental issues. In 2011 she was a Democracy Fellow at the U.S. Agency for International Development, and in 2012 she was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Botswana.

Dr. Debadatta Bose, The Robbins Postdoctoral Scholar at Berkeley Law

Debadatta Bose is a postdoctoral scholar at the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory (BCPLT). Previously, he served as a postdoctoral researcher at Tilburg University, The Netherlands where he contributed to studying the overlap between labor law and corporate responsibility law. Debadatta’s research focuses on the intersection of public international law and private law theory, with a particular emphasis on corporate responsibility for adverse human rights impacts of business activities. He is equally passionate about Third World Approaches to International Law and decolonial approaches to law more broadly. He has enriched the academic experience of students at the University of Amsterdam through his courses on international investment law, and international law and sustainable development, and at Tilburg University through his courses on obligations and contracts law, and international labor law and globalization.

At BCPLT, Debadatta will research on articulating postcolonial private law through Hanoch Dagan and Avihay Dorfman’s theory of relational justice. This builds on his Ph.D. where, using relational justice theory, he articulated a transnational corporate responsibility to prevent and mitigate adverse human rights impacts in corporate supply chains.

Debadatta is co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook on Law and Responsible Business, and his scholarship has been widely published internationally in journals like the ICSID Review and the Business and Human Rights Journal. He was the (co-)Chair of the Working Group on Business and Human Rights at the Netherlands National Network for Human Rights Research, the Dutch national body of human rights academics.

He earned his Ph.D. from the Amsterdam Law School, University of Amsterdam, his LL.M. (cum laude) in International and European Union Law from Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and his B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) from Damodaram Sanjivayya National Law University, India. He was the valedictorian in both his LL.M. and B.A. LL.B. (Hons.). He was also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University.

Omar Gomez, Researcher and Affiliated Scholar at the Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies, UC Berkeley

Omar Gómez Trejo received his law degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and holds a Master's Degree from FLACSO. He worked for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights for 12 years in Mexico and Central America. He was the Executive Secretary of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) for the Ayotzinapa case (2015-2016). He was the lead Prosecutor of the Special Unit for the Investigation and Litigation of the Ayotzinapa case at Mexico's Attorney General Office from June 2019 to September 2022. Most recently, he was a visiting scholar at the Berkeley Law Human Rights Center through the Practitioners at Risk program. Gómez Trejo is working at CLACS on our forthcoming podcast program.

Laurel E. Fletcher, Berkeley Law, Chancellor’s Clinical Professor and Co-Director, Miller Institute

Laurel E. Fletcher is Clinical Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, School of Law where she directs the International Human Rights Law Clinic. Fletcher is active in the areas of human rights, humanitarian law, international criminal justice, and transitional justice. As director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic, she utilizes an interdisciplinary, problem-based approach to human rights research, advocacy, and policy.

Fletcher has advocated on behalf of victims before international courts and tribunals, and has issued numerous human rights reports on topics ranging from sexual violence in armed conflict to human rights violations of tipped workers in the US restaurant industry. She also has conducted several empirical human rights studies, including of the impact of detention on former detainees who were held in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She served as co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Transitional Justice (2011-2015). Fletcher was selected as a Herbert Smith Freehills Visitor to the Faculty of Law in the University of Cambridge for 2019.

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