Global Advocates for Justice: The 2020–2021 LL.M. Human Rights Fellows

Protecting the Rights of Disadvantaged Populations
Hometown: Lagos, Nigeria

Inspired by his own firsthand experiences with underdevelopment, religious extremism, and widespread corruption, Hillary Maduka strives to advance human rights and serve disadvantaged populations.

As an undergraduate at the University of Jos in Nigeria, he volunteered and taught child rights at an Internally Displaced Persons camp for children orphaned and displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency. In 2015, Maduka served as a United Nations humanitarian policy youth consultant in Qatar, where he worked to find lasting solutions to humanitarian issues.

In recognition of his work and to empower him to replicate the human rights successes of the European Union in Africa, the German government granted him a scholarship to study the mechanisms of the European human rights protection system. In 2017, Maduka built on his studies in Nigeria and Germany by coordinating the first cohort of the Common Ground Centre’s human rights protection fellowship.

He recently founded the Project Freedom Initiative, through which he has secured the freedom of several persons unlawfully detained by law enforcement. “I set up this initiative upon reading a report from the Nigerian Prisons Service, which showed that Nigeria’s prisons held 72,277 people as of April 16, 2018. Of these, only 23,048 were convicted; the remaining 49,229 (68.1% of the prison population) were awaiting trial—over half of them for at least a year,” he says. Through this initiative, he continues to work to stem abuse and pervasive unconstitutional pretrial detentions.

At Columbia Law, Maduka will broaden his knowledge of human rights and advocacy. “Over the course of my career, I have become increasingly aware of how much established systems of inequality can ‘fight back’ and how technical the struggle for even basic rights can get,” he says. Via the Human Rights Institute, he hopes to learn more about digital rights-related issues, human rights violations enabled by the advancement of technology, and novel threats that technology poses to human rights protections. Ultimately, he would like to apply existing laws in innovative ways to curb such violations.