and enhancing training, education, and research in human rights.
Research topics include the application of international human
rights and humanitarian law during armed conflict; civil strife and
the protection of minorities; and the interrelationship between
human rights and economic development. Among the organizations
awarded grants this year were Cultural Survival, for research,
advocacy, and public education to advance the rights of indigenous
peoples, and the International Centre for the Legal Protection of
Human Rights, to provide lawyers and judges with information and
guidance on international and human rights law.
U.S.
Foreign Policy
The
Foundation supports efforts to develop scholarship within the
United States on new approaches to foreign policy in the post-cold
war world. Also assisted are public education programs intended to
broaden the understanding of legislators and the public about key
foreign policy issues, as well as projects that strive to improve
U.S. dialogue with developing countries and with other major
powers.
This year
grants were made to National Public Radio to continue its
international news coverage, to the Aspen Institute for a forum on
U.S. policy toward South Africa for members of Congress, and to
Parliamentarians for Global Action for an international dialogue on
the changing nature of the international system.
Throughout
its work, the Foundation seeks to incorporate diverse voices and
nontraditional institutions in the policy-making process. To
further this goal, the Foundation supports a program of the Woodrow
Wilson National Fellowship Foundation that prepares minority
students for careers in public service and international
affairs.
Former
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
The
Foundation's program in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
has focused on three key areas of the region's transition to
democracy: economic and social policy making, political and legal
reform and human rights, and the reform of higher education in the
social sciences and law. Grants support research, policy analysis,
technical assistance, and pilot projects by indigenous
institutions, both governmental and nongovernmental, in Russia,
Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia.
Among the
organizations receiving grants this year were the Stockholm School
of Economics, for a project to provide Western advisers on economic
reform to the Russian government, and the Institute for Human
Sciences in Vienna, for research on the social impact of economic
reform in the region. Particular emphasis is placed on advancing
the process of legal reform and respect for international human
rights standards, as well as bolstering parliamentary institutions.
For example, grants went to the Human Rights Project Group, for
technical assistance to help the Russian parliament develop
legislation in the areas of human rights, criminal justice, and
court reform.
The
Foundation also supports research and curricular reform in the
region's institutions of higher education, as well as research on
the region in Western institutions. A grant to the Stefan Batory
Foundation in Warsaw is supporting a summer school for intensive
training in market economics for Central European professors of
economics, and a grant to the Foreign Policy Research Institute is
assisting studies of the new republics of Central Asia.