Zoe Sigman (MPP 2024) is awarded the Human Rights Master’s Thesis Award 2024; Kasyoka P. Mutunga (MIA 2024) receives an honourable mention
Nine theses focusing on the role of human rights in domestic, regional, or global law and governance, submitted as part of the MIA, MPP, MDS, or EMPA programmes, were nominated for the 2024 award. These were evaluated by the Selection Committee in August 2024.
The committee, comprising researchers from the Centre for Fundamental Rights not involved in supervising any of the theses, selected Zoe Sigman (MPP 2024) as the recipient of the Human Rights Thesis Award 2024 for her dissertation titled "Migrant Deaths on the United States-Mexico Border, 2014-2017. A Multiple Systems Estimation Approach," in which she collaborated with the International Organization of Migration’s Missing Migrants Project.
The committee was highly impressed by Sigman’s thesis, which investigates how state policies contribute to migrant mortality and analyses data from four independent organisations to account for the true number of migrant deaths along the US-Mexico border. Sigman clearly problematises the reporting issues of the United States in accounting for such deaths. By applying a novel and innovative statistical approach, she finds that official sources significantly undercount deaths along the border, estimating the true number of deaths to be 35-61% higher than previously reported figures. In its consideration the committee noted that the thesis is of exceptional quality and makes an excellent contribution to human rights scholarship, both on a substantive and methodological dimension, by demonstrating how forensic data infrastructure can be used to highlight the terrible human costs of border policies. Sigman’s work thus does not only speak to an urgent and pressing human rights problem but also examines it from a highly interdisciplinary perspective, combining statistical inference with a deep understanding of migration law and policy. She concludes with a range of concrete policy proposals that can be used to improve data collection and standardisation in migration as well as to create better governmental border enforcement policies to prevent migrant deaths.
The Committee also awarded an honourable mention to Kasyoka P. Mutunga (MIA 2024) for her thesis “The International Monetary Fund’s Conditionality Regime: A Cautionary Tale on the Pitfalls of Human Rights Mainstreaming”. She comprehensively investigates whether the IMF’s new strategy aimed at centring human rights concerns leads to changes in its lending regime. Her thesis is focused on a deep single case study of the IMF’s conditionality measures vis-à-vis Kenya from 1988 to today. Her detailed work demonstrates the absence of any substantial impact of the respective human rights strategy on lending, offering a highly critical analyses of the potentials and limitations of human rights mainstreaming in financial institutions.
The award winners were announced during the “Meet the Centre” event, hosted by the Centre for Fundamental Rights on 12 September 2024.