Human rights have become the moral language of today, the idiom in which we discuss our common humanity and weigh competing claims for resources, rights and protections. The Human Rights Interdisciplinary Minor at UC - Berkeley allows students to shape their education around coursework which investigates the legal, political, historical, economic, social, psychological, and representational dynamics of human rights. 
Helping undergraduates explore issues via multiple forms of thought and media of expression - through literature as well as politics, journalism as well as law, film as well as anthropology – the HRI minor emphasizes the many different intellectual spaces in which human rights questions are currently being posed.
UC - Berkeley is already a fertile ground for human rights study and work. The campus houses the Human Rights Center, which conducts human rights investigations and promotes research around the globe, The 2048 Project, an interactive website created by faculty at Boalt Hall School of Law which allows students to learn about and participate in the evolution of human rights, and The War Crimes Studies Center, which monitors war crimes worldwide. Berkeley students undertake human-rights related internships through a number of campus programs, including CITRUS (Information Technology Research in the Interests of Society), Peace and Conflict Studies, and the Global Poverty Minor, to name just a few.
Dozens of individual faculty members do research into human rights issues, and over one hundred courses across campus are offered each semester which directly treat human rights, while dozens more are indirectly related.
The Human Rights Minor offers a teaching program specifically focused on human rights but open to myriad disciplinary approaches and welcoming students from many corners of campus. In so doing, it encourages students to recognize how human rights are intertwined with fields as disparate as postcolonial literature and medical ethics, as well as with the more familiar fields of politics and international law.
