Climate accountability with Columbia’s Human Rights Clinic

During his Columbia Law School LL.M., completed in 2025, Parth Singh contributed through the Smith Family Human Rights Clinic to research undertaken with Amnesty International. The academic-credit collaboration examined the human-rights implications of fossil-fuel infrastructure.
 

Fossil-fuel projects can affect the rights of communities alongside the climate and ecosystems on which people depend. The collaboration considered these connections through research on oil, gas and petrochemical infrastructure, corporate conduct and public responsibilities.
 

Parth’s Columbia year combined the LL.M. with staff editing for the Columbia Human Rights Law Review and A Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual, and academic research assistance. The clinic brought another form of legal work into that year: collaboration on a human-rights research project.
 

The institutional research addressed fossil-fuel infrastructure around Guanabara Bay in Brazil and on Wet’suwet’en territory in Canada. The bay photograph provides geographic context for the project. The report examines relationships between infrastructure, communities, human rights and critical ecosystems.
 

Amnesty International published Extraction Extinction in November 2025. Its acknowledgments credit Columbia clinic students and professors collectively. Columbia’s Human Rights Institute also published an account of the partnership and the report’s launch.
 

Read Columbia’s account of the collaboration and Amnesty’s report announcement.
 

Continue to Columbia Law School, editorial work or selected scholarship.
 

Photograph: Guanabara Bay and Santos Dumont Airport, Rio de Janeiro. ASSY · source · CC0. Resized, re-encoded and cropped.