Oak Institute for Human Rights

The Oak Institute for Human Rights, established in 1997, champions the struggles for dignity, freedom, and justice for people throughout the world. It provides the opportunity for a front-line human rights activist operating in difficult or dangerous circumstances to come to Colby College in the fall for respite and reflection. Oak strives to educate the campus and extended community about the Oak Fellow’s work. It also encourages members of the campus community—especially students—to participate in research, internships, programming, and activism that support human rights.

The Oak Institute’s 2024-2025 theme is Health and Human Rights. Although it can be hard to define, health is not, as the World Health Organization (WHO) reminds us, simply the absence of disease. Instead, health can be understood as a holistic and affirmative way of existing in the world. We can think of health at many different, interconnected scales: individual, family, community, society, and planetary. After all, the preamble of the 1946 Constitution of the World Health Organization states that “the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic, or social condition.”

But reality falls far short of this declaration because of ever-changing climate and environmental factors, pandemics, politicization of health-related issues, and lack of access to the social and structural factors that make health possible such as safe drinking water and adequate sanitation; nourishing and nutritious food and housing; healthy working and environmental conditions; health-related education and information; access to health care; and racial and gender equality.