AAAS Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program

Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights Project

Project Staff

Audrey Chapman, Ph.D., Director of the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program, will serve as project co-director. She will provide overall supervision of project staff, finances and operations and will play a central role in developing and writing the report identifying the 10-15 common violations of ESCR and exploring the theoretical issues they raise. Dr. Chapman is trained as a political scientist and an ethicist. She spent nine years engaged in social science research in four countries in Africa and the Middle East and is the author of eight books and numerous articles on human rights, women and development issues and ethics. Dr. Chapman is an internationally recognized expert on health and human rights and monitoring economic, social and cultural rights, which are two of her major research interests, and she is frequently invited to speak at international conferences and meetings on these topics. She was an invited participant at the conference at Maastricht University that adopted an influential set of guidelines on monitoring economic, social and cultural rights.

Manuel Guzman, Executive Director of HURIDOCS, will also serve as project co-director. Mr. Guzman has been active in the HURIDOCS network since 1988, and became its Executive Director in 1995. He has an extensive background in human rights and community development and has worked with human rights organizations at the national, regional and international levels, including long-term affiliations with several human rights NGOs in the Philippines. In recent years Mr. Guzman has focused on human rights documentation and the application of information technology to human rights. He has designed databases for human rights NGOs and has written or co-authored several books and articles on human rights documentation.

Stephen Hansen, M.A., Senior Program Associate in the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program, will serve as the project’s technical director. He will be responsible for development of the monitoring system and for overseeing the project’s use of the World Wide Web. Mr. Hansen has had 14 years of professional experience in application consulting, design and programming. He has also been a pioneer in the application of document database technology and has assisted in developing several commercial PC and mainframe-based document database applications. Since 1995, he has worked extensively in human rights documentation projects, primarily in Latin America.