The H block class had two guest speakers during this rotation; Mr. Kamm, founder of The Dui Hua Foundation, and Naomi Roht-Arriaza, a law professor at UC Hastings Law school. We also learned through film by watching part of Ararat, a 2002 film that tells a fictional story about the Armenian Genocide.
Mr. Kamm spoke about the advantages of improving human rights in China from a business standpoint. The Dui Hua Foundation researches the names of Chinese prisoners and asks about them, which is proven to improve their conditions while in prison and increase their chances of being let out early.
Professor Roht-Arriaza talked about the legal definition of genocide as well as the definitions of "crimes against humanity," "war crimes," and "aggression." She also talked about the legal difficulty of proving that a massacre is in fact genocide because it requires proof that the intent was to annihilate a specific racial, ethnic, religious or national group. She is currently working on a case to prove that the massacres in Guatemala of the Mayan people was a genocide. She also explained how the International Criminal Court (ICC) works, and how a case can be brought to trial under the ICC, as well as its effectiveness. (The United States refuses to become a party of the ICC.)
The film, Ararat, set in the present, depicts an Armenian family that decides to help out an Armenian director, Edward Saroyan, to make a Hollywood-style film about the genocide, from the fictionalised point of view of a genuine historical figure, Archile Gorky. Though we only got to watch the first half of the film, it was very interesting to see the effects of the genocide on a family almost 100 years later.
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