The Sana’a Center’s partnership with the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic spans nearly a decade of joint research and advocacy on human rights in Yemen. Each academic semester, cohorts of international law students work alongside Sana’a Center experts, focusing on international human rights law, accountability, and legal approaches to conflict and peacebuilding.

The partnership covered three areas of work. It has combined research and advocacy on the mental health impacts of armed conflict, including joint work with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health documenting the scale of psychological distress in Yemen and strengthening global and national responses to a largely overlooked crisis.

It has also advanced victim-centered transitional justice approaches through engagement with the UN Human Rights Council, advocating for accountability as a core pillar of sustainable peace and grounding these efforts in international human rights law.

More recently, the partnership has expanded into environmental and climate justice, producing the report Conflict and Climate: The Need for a Roadmap for Green Transitional Justice in Yemen, which makes the case for integrating environmental harms into transitional justice frameworks, drawing on comparative legal experiences from other conflict-affected contexts.