Daniel Wilkinson is the 2025-2026 Weissberg Chair in Human Rights and Social Justice, focusing during his week-long residency on the topic of climate change and climate justice. Wilkinson made his Keynote appearance before a packed audience of students, faculty, and administration at 7 p.m. in the Weissberg Auditorium for a lecture titled “Human Rights and the Climate Crisis,” in step with this year’s theme. Wilkinson had spent the previous day visiting classes, and he would host a luncheon the next day to talk with Beloit students, as well as host a workshop entitled “Ending Avocado-Driven Deforestation: Anatomy of a Climate Campaign” on April 2. 

Wilkinson was given a multi-layered introduction featuring Beloit College President Eric Boynton and Professor of Chinese and Associate Dean of the College Daniel Youd. In addition to giving a short biography of Wilkinson, Youd shared stories from his time as Wilkinson’s roommate when the two were students at Harvard College. 

A Harvard and Yale School of Law graduate, former director of the Environment Division at Human Rights Watch, and currently a senior policy advisor at Climate Rights International, Wilkinson has had a long career as a human rights advocate. His work includes the award winning book “Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala,” an environmental and sociological history of Guatemala’s tragic civil war, as well as numerous reports featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and more. 

After quickly thanking faculty and administration, Wilkinson began the lecture with a discussion on the Global Human Rights Project, a unifying international framework under which each sovereign state is obligated to respect and uphold the norms of human rights. Wilkinson situates human rights broadly as civil, political, economic, and cultural rights, which are to be upheld for both domestic and international security. These rights were codified under the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the foundation of the Global Human Rights Project, and the code by which all human rights agencies follow.

He relayed that the foundation of the United Nations was built on the idea of cooperation between the world’s leaders. Despite this success, the UN has little authority over operations within state borders. Since its inception after World War II, there have been many humanitarian crises across the globe. Wilkinson cited the 2002 Venezuelan coup d’etat as an example of the UN’s inability to respond to internal affairs. It is up to human rights agencies to step in and do what governments cannot or refuse to do. 

In 2000, Wilkinson joined Human Rights Watch’s Latin American division, working to compel powerful state actors to adhere to human rights. Wilkinson described the organization’s efforts in Colombia, where human rights groups set up a meeting securing a valuable trade deal with the United States on the condition that the Colombian government would oust the far-right paramilitary group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia in Spanish), which was terrorizing the citizens. Wilkinson also worked on the InterAmerican Democratic Charter, helping to ensure cooperation between countries of the Americas and consolidate democracy.

However, following the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, foundations of world peace and international cooperation were shaken. It seemed war and conflict would continue into the next century. Wilkinson said in his address that he believed that the global human rights project was “doomed” and that “I felt gutted, but I still had a job to do.”

Creating strategies for keeping governments accountable can be extraordinarily difficult work, but there do exist levers of power to push in order to get things done. For example, Wilkinson described three methods commonly employed in these struggles: appeals to altruism, naming and shaming, and, perhaps most importantly, self-interest. Appeals to altruism depend on the good nature and democratic integrity of a nation to work effectively. Naming and shaming on the other hand seeks to expose atrocities and leverage international pressure in order to bring them to an end. This too is limited by the international context in which it’s situated, being effective only in a strong global human rights regime. Appeals to self-interest can also be powerful tools in the human rights advocacy arsenal. “The question,” Wilkinson said, “is whether we can harness [these strategies] in the service of solutions.” 

The next historical snapshot that Wilkinson projected onto the massive screen in the Weissberg auditorium was an image of the 2015 Paris Climate Accords. He described the summit as perhaps the closest moment in the modern era that has attempted to recapture the collectivist ethos of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights he had mentioned previously. It emphasized the idea that, as Wilkinson puts it, “States have responsibilities beyond their own borders.” 

The Earth has warmed considerably since the beginning of the Industrial Age, and a climate crisis is more than expected, it’s already happening. Coastal flooding, droughts, and food shortages have already caused large amounts of violence and displacement. But Wilkinson offers a new perspective; “We are all in this together.” The life of the planet affects all of us, and our collective need to respond will spur governments to action and by necessity consider the value of human rights. Two main strategies that we can pursue now, Wilkinson said, are to “keep fossil fuels underground” and “keep trees standing.” 

Continuing the presentation, Wilkinson provided the salient example of Brazil, specifically under the right-wing presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. Under his regime, deforestation of the Amazon skyrocketed as more and more land was taken up for industrial agriculture, flying in the face of previous climate declarations and environmental protections. Wilkinson explained how, working with Human Rights Watch and employing a combination of strategic international campaigning, leveraging coveted trade-deals with the EU, as well as membership into the influential OECD, they effectively curbed deforestation and partially discredited Bolsonaro’s legitimacy. In 2023, Bolsonaro was ousted and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva would take his place, working to restore much of the democratic and environmental damage wreaked by his predecessor. 

Similar action was taken in Mexico, when land was taken by criminal organizations to illegally farm avocadoes and sell them in the U.S. market. Human rights groups stepped in to work with indigenous landowners to expose the injustices and protect against deforestation. Wilkinson stressed the idea that NGOs work not to impose a proclaimed superior ethics on foreign governments, but to work with citizens to fight against organized crime syndicates and autocrats. 

Near the end of his remarks, Wilkinson offered a glimpse at the future through the lens of two possible scenarios for climate action that could play out over the next couple of decades. The first would be an environmental catastrophe that fuels mass displacement and the development of reactionary politics. The second and decidedly more hopeful strategy that Wilkinson put forth was one of human rights advocacy, playing a central role in navigating through the climate crisis and urging a sense of collective responsibility among people and governments. Before taking questions from audience members, Wilkinson ended his keynote by once again uttering what appears to be his human rights and climate mantra. “We are all indeed in this together,” he said. 

_{Featured image: Cian McKeown’27}