The Harvard Health and Human Rights Journal and the Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights has published a special journal issue entitled “Public and Mental Health, Human Rights, and Atrocity Prevention.” For the past two years, the editors of this special issue have worked in close collaboration to consider the various ways in which human rights and rights-based approaches can promote public health and mental health policies and practices in the prevention of mass atrocity crimes. In June 2019, they convened academics and practitioners engaged in work at the intersections of these disciplines across various contexts and at various intervention points along the continuum of harms that can be defined as atrocity crimes. Represented among these scholars and practitioners were psychologists, sociologists, social psychologists, epidemiologists, public health practitioners, political scientists, legal scholars, human rights practitioners, anthropologists, historians, peace studies scholars, and philosophers.

One result of this work is this special journal issue, where the authors of the collected papers dive deeply into the public health and mental health rights dilemmas that emerge from prevention efforts related to identity-based violence and mass atrocity crimes—including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. They examine the ways practitioners and scholars can adapt rights and health frameworks, methods, research, tools, and practice toward a more sophisticated and truly interdisciplinary understanding and application of atrocity prevention. In their totality, the papers demonstrate the state of these current fields and the intersecting themes within human rights, public health, mental health, and mass atrocity prevention and, importantly, future potential directions for next collaborative steps.

Read the full table of contents here: https://www.hhrjournal.org/volume-23-issue-1-june-2021/