Special Minerva Projects

In recent years, the Minerva Center has introduced a unique set of Faculty-led programs aimed at graduate students, as well as junior and senior scholars working in the field of human rights.

Minerva's special programs are designed to enable researchers from Israel and abroad to meet throughout the academic year in order to discuss and promote research on contemporary human rights issues, as well as encourage international collaborations – both within and outside academia.

The various programs feature a diverse assortment of courses, forums and seminars that are set in an interdisciplinary framework, and chiefly combine comparative, transnational and global perspectives.

There are four different topic-based programs: Law, Globalization and the Transitional Sphere – a program devoted to understating the role of transitional litigation and NGOs in advancing human rights and political freedom around the world; Human Rights and Liberal Justice in Israel – a program that encourages a historical analysis of the country's human rights institutes and organizations; and Human Rights and Transitional Justice – a unique cross-national research program that places the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a focal point for examining the contribution of transitional measures on the condition and nature of the country's legal system. In the years 2015-2016 the Center launched a special project: Family, Human Rights and Globalization.

In 2018 the Minerva Center launched the project Protection of Cultural Heritage: Between Individual and Group Rights. Under this theme, the Center will initiate several events that will be dedicated to the research the intersection of cultural heritage, human rights, and group rights. This will be done through interdisciplinary study of the history of past events of cultural destruction and the legal responses to these events, as well as current cases (such as the recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other places that featured the deliberate, symbolic destruction of cultural artefacts and sites).

Tel Aviv University and Bonn University collaboration: Nazi-Looted Art

For the past three years (2021-2024), TAU and University of Bonn, Germany collaborated in an academic course dedicated to the legal and historical issues of Nazi-looted art, offered to law and art-history students from both universities. This interdisciplinary course enjoyed the participation of many international guest speakers from diverse backgrounds: leading experts from museums, auction houses, NGOs, and experts in art and cultural property law from across Europe (Germany, Austria, Netherlands, France, UK, Switzerland), North-American and Israel.

Professor Dr Matthias Weller (2024), Learning from Teaching the Restitution of Nazi-Looted Art in Comparative Perspectives