Human Rights Happy Hour Speaker Series Biography Archive
2008-2009
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Helena Alviar is Associate Professor and Director of the Doctorate and Master's in Law Programs at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She is also a researcher for the USAID-funded project, Improving Land Distribution in Colombia . Alviar received her undergraduate degree in Law and a postgraduate degree in Financial Legislation from the Universidad de Los Andes. She earned her Master's and Doctorate in Law from Harvard University. As an expert in feminist approaches to law and development, she has been invited to teach and speak to audiences around the world. She has published articles in the United States and Latin America, and has been awarded with the Colfuturo Scholarship, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Enrique Low Murtra Scholaship, the Lewis Fellowship, and the Byse Fellowship.
Susan Benesch is Visiting Professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, Dean's Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center, and Senior Legal Advisor at the Center for Justice and Accountability. Professor Benesch earned a B.A. in history from Columbia College, winning high honors and the Henry Evans prize for scholarship in modern history. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was a member of the Prison Clinic, and a Team Leader for the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. Also during law school, she served as law clerk in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, split a summer between the Israeli Supreme Court and the Palestinian human rights group Mandela, and worked as a consultant to the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First). In 2000, Susan was awarded the Robert L. Bernstein fellowship in International Human Rights to work in the asylum program of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. She went on to Amnesty International USA, where she worked as Refugee Advocate and then directed the AIUSA Refugee Program, before coming to CALS. Between college and law school, she was a journalist abroad. She was chief staff writer in Haiti for the Miami Herald before, during and after the 1994 U.S. invasion, and has reported from countries including Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Cuba, Brazil, and Russia for other newspapers and magazines. Her recent publications include “The Ever-Expanding Material Support Bar: An Unjust Obstacle for Refugees and Asylum. Seekers,” Interpreter Releases, Vol. 83, No. 11, at 466 (Mar. 13, 2006) (with Devon Chaffee); “Inciting Genocide, Pleading Free Speech” World Policy Journal, Summer 2004, at 62; “Friendly Settlement in Human Rights Cases,” in L.C. Vohrah et al (eds.), Man's Inhumanity to Man, Netherlands: Kluwer Law International, 2003 (with W. Michael Reisman); and “Effective Command,” Legal Affairs, Sept.-Oct. 2002.
Daniel Blocq is a Lieutenant in the Royal Netherlands Navy and served as a UN Military Observer for the UN Mission in the Sudan (UNMIS). During the six months that he spent in the Sudan, Lt. Blocq gained considerable insight into the factors that affect the success of UN Missions. He is currently a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He earned degrees in International and European Law and in Tax Law from the University of Amsterdam, and received his Master's in Law from Cornell University. Lt. Blocq was an Assistant Professor at the Netherlands Defense Academy and a Part-time Legal Advisor at the Royal Netherlands Naval College. He has published works on asymmetrical warfare, the use of force by soldiers, the War on Terrorism, and UN peacekeeping, and has given lectures in England, Hungary, the Netherlands, and the US. He received research fellowships from the Netherlands and from Emory Law School, and was the recipient of the Commodore's Teaching Award.
Rhonda Evans Case graduated phi beta kappa from Kent State University's Honors College in 1992 with a B.A. in Political Science. In 1995, she received a J.D. from the University of Pittsburgh's School of Law and was admitted to the Bar in the State of Ohio, where she subsequently worked as an Assistant Prosecuting Attorney and a staff lawyer for Southeastern Ohio Legal Services. Evans Case received a Ph.D. from the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin in 2004, with concentrations in Public Law and Comparative Politics. Before accepting a position as an Assistant Professor in East Carolina University's Department of Political Science in 2006, she worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Claremont McKenna College. Evans Case has published in a variety of venues, including the Journal of Democracy, the Australian Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Common Market Studies, and Congress and the Presidency.
Kathleen Neal Cleaver is a Visiting Professor at the University of Texas School of Law. She has spent most of her life participating in the human rights struggle. She dropped out of Barnard College in 1966 to work full time with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) where she served in the Campus Program. From 1967 to 1971 she was the Communications Secretary of the Black Panther Party, the first woman member of their Central Committee. After sharing years of exile with her former husband Eldridge Cleaver, she returned to the United States in late 1975. Devoting many years to challenging racist injustice, Cleaver has worked to free imprisoned freedom fighters, including Geronimo (Pratt) ji Jaga and Mumia Abu-Jamal. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in History from Yale College in 1984, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After receiving a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1989, Cleaver became an associate at the New York law firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore. Kathleen Cleaver joined the faculty of Emory University Law School in 1992. Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including Ramparts, The Black Panther, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, and Transition, and she has contributed scholarly essays to the books Critical Race Feminism, Critical White Studies, The Promise of Multiculturalism, and The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. Along with George Katsificas, humanities professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology, she co-edited the essay collection Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party (Routledge, 2001). She recently edited a collection of writings by Eldridge Cleaver, Target Zero: A Life in Writing (Palgrave, 2006).
Dan Connell is a Distinguished Lecturer in Journalism and African Politics at Simmons College in Boston, MA. He received his B.A. in English from Hobart College and his Master's in English from the University at Buffalo. His previous experience includes working as a Middle East Projects Officer for Oxfam America, serving as Executive Director of Grassroots International, and reporting as an independent journalist and photographer. Professor Connell has consulted for a wide spectrum of organizations and events, including the State Department, the UN Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum, the U.S. Committee for Refugees, and Human Rights Watch. His knowledge and experiences led him to publish numerous books and articles on Africa, the plight of refugees, and conflict management. A two-time MacArthur Foundation grantee, Connell's recent books include Women-to-Women: Young Americans in South Africa, and Conversations with Eritrean Political Prisoners ., Professor Connell has been invited to lecture around the United States, in London, and in Eritrea, and has been interviewed by major networks and newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, and CBS-TV's "Evening News".
Shirin Ebadi is a courageous and accomplished civil rights activist and lecturer in law at the University of Tehran. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her pioneering efforts to advance democracy and human rights—especially the rights of women and children—in post-revolutionary Iran. Among the most visible and prominent women in the Islamic world, Ebadi first achieved distinction in the mid-1970s as the first woman judge to preside over a legislative court in Iran. Nearly thirty years later, she became the first Iranian, the first Shia, and the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Prize. A supporter of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Ebadi nonetheless was stripped of her judgeship and of her license to practice law when conservative clerics prevailed in their interpretation of Islam as forbidding legal practice by women. Refusing to leave Iran, Ebadi raised a family and boldly fought for legal and human rights reform throughout the 1980s and, in 1992, succeeded in regaining her law license. A frequent defense counsel for Iranian liberals and dissidents and plaintiff's counsel for victims of civil and human rights abuses. Ebadi helped establish two non-governmental organizations in Iran, the Society for Protecting the Rights of the Child (SPRC) and the Defenders of Human Rights Center (DHRC), and drafted the original text of a law against physical abuse of children, which was passed by the Iranian parliament in 2002. She is the author of numerous books and articles—including two recent works for Western audiences, Democracy, Human Rights, and Islam and a moving and illuminating personal account of her experience of the Iranian Revolution, Iran Awakening: One Woman's Journey to Reclaim her Life and Country.
Roberto Gargarella is a professor of Constitutional Theory and Political Philosophy at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. He received degrees in Law and Sociology from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, an Master's in Political Science from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), and a J.D. and Master's in Law from the University of Chicago. He also conducted postdoctoral research at Balliol College, Oxford. Gargarella has authored and edited more than 25 books in English and Spanish on constitutional theory, political philosophy, and democratic law, with an emphasis on economic and social rights. He has been honored with numerous awards, including a Tinker Scholarship, a Fulbright Scholarship, a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Selected as a LLILAS Visiting Resource Professor for fall 2008, Gargarella has also been a visiting professor at the University of Bergen, Southwestern University, University of Oslo, and the Universitat Pompeu Fabre, and a visiting scholar at Columbia University and New York University.
Benjamin Gregg is Associate Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. He earned a B.A. from Yale, a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Free University of Berlin, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Princeton. Professor Gregg writes and teaches about modern European and American social and political theory. He is currently writing two books: a critical social theory of nationalism and communal identity in the twenty-first century titled Political Solidarity Without Nationalism, and a proposal for a new form of state sovereignty titled State-Based Human Rights for a State-Centric World. He regularly teaches in the Departments of Sociology and Philosophy. The College of Liberal Arts awarded him the 1999 Silver Spurs Fellowship for outstanding scholarship and teaching. His recent publications include: Thick Moralities, Thin Politics: Social Integration Across Communities of Belief (Duke University Press, 2003); Coping In Politics With Indeterminate Norms: A Theory of Enlightened Localism (SUNY Press, 2003); "Proceduralism Reconceived: Political Conflict Resolution under Conditions of Moral Pluralism," in Theory and Society (2002); "The Law and Courts of Enlightened Localism," in Polity (2002); "Using Legal Rules in an Indeterminate World: Overcoming the Limitations of Jurisprudence," in Political Theory (1999); and "Adjudicating Among Competing Systems of Belief," in International Review of Sociology (1999).
Gustavo Meoño is the Coordinator of the National Police Archives of Guatemala, and directs the project for the recuperation of these archives (PRAHPN, in Spanish). As the lead investigator on the archives for the national ombudsman's office, Meoño has been actively involved in both the preservation of the archive's documents and in collecting evidence from these documents to provide accounts of human rights abuses committed during the country's 36-year civil war. Meoño has served as president of the Rigoberta Menchú Tum Foundation (Fundación Rigoberta Menchú Tum), an organization based in Guatemala City that has played a crucial role in struggles against impunity for human rights violations related to prolonged armed conflict in the country.
The National Police Archives
The National Police Archives of Guatemala in Guatemala City, discovered accidentally in 2005, contain an estimated 80 million documents detailing violent conflict and human rights abuses in the country. Investigators with the national ombudsman's office found the archives in an old police building while searching for a munitions cache, and realized the files in the building contained information that the Guatemalan police had denied existed. The Historical Clarification Commission, which opened in 1997, had requested documents related to police and military actions during the 36-year civil war from the ministries of defense and the interior. The Commission received no documents, and were told that the Guatemalan police and military had no evidence of their operations during the period of armed conflict.
There has been much interest in making these documents public. The archives represent a crucial tool in the ongoing fight against impunity related to the civil war, as they detail the deaths and disappearances of thousands of Guatemalans and could contribute to building historical memory. Many hope that the documents can be used to supplement testimonies given for the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification, as well as for trials related to disappearance and other grave human rights abuses committed in recent decades.
Read more: Recovery of the Guatemalan Police Archives - An Update, by Kate Boyle (George Washington University, The National Security Archive: July 2, 2008). See also our Projects and Publications: Impunity in Guatemala.
Cancellation of Gustavo Meoño's Lecture, April 22
On April 20, 2009, the Rapoport Center announced the cancellation of Meoño's visit: "We are very sorry to inform you that the visit by Gustavo Meoño has been cancelled. Mr. Meoño is the Director of the National Police Archives in Guatemala, which is ultimately under the authority of the Human Rights Ombudsman of Guatemala. Just three weeks ago, the Archives released the first report of human rights violations, using information from the Archives, and announced that certain information would be open to the public. Hours after the announcement, the Ombudsman's wife was kidnapped and held for 13 hours, severely tortured and ultimately released. Since then, the staff of the Archives has noticed surveillance of the premises from unmarked cars and people photographing the staff as it leaves the building. People who would like to use the Archives to investigate the disappearance or death of loved ones also feel under threat. The Archives have greatly stepped up security of the premises, the staff, and staff family members. Mr. Meoño does not feel he can leave the country at the moment and is staying in Guatemala to supervise the security efforts."
Gretchen Ritter is a Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. She received her B.S. in government from Cornell University and her Ph.D. in political science from MIT. Professor Ritter specializes in studies of American politics, constitutional development, and gender politics from a historical and theoretical perspective. She is currently examining the impact of work-family issues on gender equity in the United States. Professor Ritter has been a Faculty Fellow at Princeton University, a Liberal Arts Fellow at Harvard Law School, and has received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. She is the Director of the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at UT. She is the author of two books, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and The Constitution as Social Design: Gender and Civic Membership in the American Constitutional Order (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). She also has a co-edited book (with Desmond King, Robert Lieberman and Laurence Whitehead), entitled Democratization in America, forthcoming Johns Hopkins University Press. She has published articles, reviews and essays in numerous peer reviewed journals in law, political science, sociology, and gender studies.
Philippe Sands is Professor of Law at the University College London, where he teaches public international law, the settlement of international disputes, and environmental and natural resources law. He is also the Director of the University's Center on International Courts and Tribunals, a member of the Center for Law and the Environment, and a key staff member for the Project on International Courts and Tribunals. Sands has lectured and held academic positions at many institutions, including the Universite de Paris I (Sorbonne), University of Melbourne, and New York University. He is also the co-founder of the Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development and a member of the advisory board for several law publications. As a practicing barrister at Matrix Chambers, Sands has litigated cases before many international courts, including the International Court of Justice. His publications include Torture Team: Cruelty, Deception and the Compromise of Law and Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules. Sands is a regular commentator on the BBC and CNN, and has written frequently for leading newspapers around the world.
2007-2008
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Itty Abraham is director of the South Asia Institute, the Marlene and Morton Meyerson Centennial Chair, and associate professor of government and Asian studies. Prior to this appointment, he was a fellow at the East-West Center, Washington, and taught at the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University. Abraham was program director for South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Global Security and Cooperation at the Social Science Research Council in New York from 1992-2005, where he helped shape the intellectual framework for post-area studies scholarship. He earned his bachelor’s degree in economics at Loyola College, Madras, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has received grants from the Ford, Rockefeller, and Wenner-Gren foundations, the Open Society Institute Burma Project and the U.S. Institute of Peace, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University. His research interests include international relations, science and technology studies, and postcolonial theory. He is currently working on the history of Indian foreign policy and understanding social risk in regions of high natural background radiation.
Álvaro Restrepo is one of Colombia´s Contemporary Dance pioneers. He studied Philosophy, Literature, Music and Theater, before dedicating his life to dance. His work has been seen in more than 30 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia. In 1992 he was commissioned as the Sub-Director of the Colombian Culture Institute and in 1993, as the Director of the Arts Superior Academy of Bogotá, where he created the first superior level Contemporary Dance school in the country. Since 1994, he has been living and working in Cartagena de Indias, where he created, with the French dancer and choreographer Marie France Delieuvin, EL COLEGIO DEL CUERPO de Cartagena de Indias - Colombia´s first Contemporary Dance choreographic formation center.
Jenifer K. Harbury is an activist, author, and attorney who has spent much of the past twenty years working to monitor and promote human rights in Guatemala. Her husband, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, was a Mayan resistance leader who was "disappeared" by the Guatemalan military in 1992; subjected to long-term, severe torture; then extrajudicially executed. Harbury's efforts to save his life, which included three dangerous hunger strikes, resulted in startling disclosures about the close working relationship between the CIA and the Central American death squads. Since learning of her husband's death, she has devoted much of her time to pressing for human rights reforms for both the United States and Guatemalan governments. Harbury graduated from Harvard Law School in 1978 and has published two books about her experiences in Guatemala: Bridge of Courage (Common Courage Press, 1994) and Searching for Everardo (Warner Books, 1997). In 2005, Harbury published another book, Truth, Torture, and the American Way, which documents the long time use of torture by the CIA.
Barbara Harlow is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor of English Literatures in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin . She taught at the American University in Cairo from 1977 to 1983, and again 2006-07 as Visiting Professor and Acting Chair of English and Comparative Literature. Other teaching experience includes University College Galway (1992), University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg (1998) and University of Natal in Durban (2002). She is the author of Resistance Literature (1986), Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (1992), After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing (1996), and co-editor with Mia Carter of Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook (1999) and Archives of Empire : Vol 1: From the East India Company to the Suez Canal and Vol 11, The Scramble for Africa (2003), and co-editor with Ferial Ghazoul of The View from Within: Writers and Critics and Contemporary Arabic Literature (1994), and with Toyin Falola of two volumes of essays in honor of Bernth Lindfors, Palavers of African Literature and African Writers and Readers (2002). She is currently working on an intellectual biography of the South African writer and activist, Ruth First.
Teaching and research interests include imperialism and orientalism, literature and human rights/social justice, the 19 th century novel, and comparative/interdisciplinary studies.
Alejandro Moreno, MD, MPH, JD, FACP, FCLM, is a faculty member at the University of Texas Medical Branch Austin Programs where he serves as an Associate Director of the Internal Medicine Residency Program. Dr. Moreno is also an adjunct faculty at the Boston University School of Public Health. He is the Associate Medical and Legal Director of the Center for Survivors of Torture and the co-founder of the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights at Boston Medical Center.
Dr. Moreno graduated from the Instituto de Ciencias de la Salud in Medellín, Colombia, where he received his medical degree. He completed his post-graduate clinical training at the Boston University Medical Center (Internal Medicine Residency Program and General Internal Medicine Fellowship Program). Dr. Moreno also holds a degree in public health from the Boston University School of Public Health and a law degree from St. Mary’s University. He actively practices medicine and law.
Dr. Moreno is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and the American College of Legal Medicine. Since 1998, Dr. Moreno is a member of University of Texas Medical Branch Austin Programs.
Dr. Moreno has an extensive experience working with refugees, survivors of torture, and other immigrants. His work with these vulnerable populations includes direct patient care, curriculum development for medical and legal professionals, and clinical research. Dr. Moreno has served as an expert witness in numerous occasions before immigration court.
Karen Engle is Cecil D. Redford Professor in Law and director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, which she helped found in 2004. She is currently completing a book entitled Indigenous Roads to Development: Self-Determination, Human Rights and Culture. Her recent publications include ''Judging Sex in War'' (forthcoming, Michigan Law Review), ''Calling in the Troops: The Uneasy Relationship Among Human Rights, Women's Rights and Humanitarian Intervention,'' Harvard Human Rights Law Journal (2007), and ''Feminism and Its (Dis)contents: Criminalizing War-Time Rape in Bosnia and Herzegovin,'' American Journal of International Law (2005).
Gerald Torres is Bryant Smith Chair in Law at the University of Texas . A leading figure in critical race theory, Torres has written and lectured extensively on American Indian Law, as well as environmental law. His latest book, The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2002) with Harvard law professor Lani Guinier, was described by Publisher's Weekly as “one of the most provocative and challenging books on race produced in years.” Torres' many articles include “Translation and Stories” (Harvard Law Review, 2002), “Who Owns the Sky?” (Pace Law Review, 2001) (Garrison Lecture), “Taking and Giving: Police Power, Public Value, and Private Right” (Environmental Law, 1996), and “Translating Yonnondio by Precedent and Evidence: The Mashpee Indian Case” (Duke Law Journal, 1990).
Shannon Speed is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology. She has worked for the last decade in Chiapas, Mexico, on issues of human rights, indigenous rights and gender. She has published a number of articles on topics related to this research and is has recently completed a book entitled Global Discourses on the Local Terrain: Human Rights and Indigenous Resistance in Chiapas (forthcoming, Stanford University Press), as well as two co-edited volumes, Human Rights in the Maya Region: Global Politics, Moral Engagements, and Culture Contentions (Duke, 2008) and Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas (UT Press, 2006).
Daniel Bonilla is an Associate Professor at Universidad de los Andes School of Law in Bogotá , Colombia . Professor Bonilla graduated from Universidad de los Andes School of Law in 1994. He earned his L.L.M. from Yale Law School in 1998 and his J.S.D. degree from the same university in 2005. He is the Director of the Public Interest Law Group of Universidad de los Andes. As the Director of G-DIP, Daniel works with students to bring cases before the Constitutional Court relating to a broad range of issues including racism, discrimination, indigenous rights, and the environment. Current projects include securing collective land rights for Afro-Colombians on the Islas de Rosario and a public action claim based on the unconstitutionality of Law 100 which currently does not provide social security benefits for same sex pairs. La Constitución Multicultural (The Multicultural Consitution) and Hacia un Nuevo Derecho Constitucional (Toward a New Consitutional Law) are among his most recent publications. Areas of interest: Philosophy of law, constitutional law, public interest law and multiculturalism.
Valentine Moghadam is Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies, and Director of the Women's Studies Program at Purdue University. From May 2004 – December 2006 she was Chief of the Section for Gender Equality and Development, of the Social and Human Sciences Sector of UNESCO, in Paris, France. Her work at UNESCO involved networking with and capacity building of women's organizations, as well as policy-oriented research on globalization and women's human rights, cultures and gender equality, and the gender dynamics of conflict, peace, and reconstruction. She helped establish the Palestinian Women's Research and Documentation Center in Ramallah, Palestinian Authority. Prior to that, she was Director of Women's Studies and Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University.
Born in Tehran, Iran, Dr. Moghadam received her higher education in Canada and the U.S. After obtaining her Ph.D. in sociology from the American University in Washington, D.C. in 1986, she taught the sociology of development and women in development at New York University. From 1990 through 1995 she was Senior Researcher and Coordinator of the Research Program on Women and Development at the WIDER Institute of the United Nations University (UNU/WIDER), and was based in Helsinki, Finland. She was a member of the UNU delegation to the World Summit on Social Development (Copenhagen, March 1995), and the Fourth World Conference on Women (in Beijing in September 1995).
Dr. Moghadam is author of Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East (first published 1993; updated second edition 2003), Women, Work and Economic Reform in the Middle East and North Africa (1998), and Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks (2005). Her edited book Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective (1994) was the first to examine fundamentalisms comparatively and cross-culturally.
Dr. Moghadam's areas of research are globalization, transnational feminist networks, civil society and citizenship, and women's employment in the Middle East. She prepared a background paper on Islam, culture, and women's rights in the Middle East for the UNDP's Human Development Report 2004. She is co-editor, with Massoud Karshenas, of Social Policy in the Middle East: Economic, Political, and Gender Dynamics (Palgrave Macmillan and UNRISD, 2006). Her most recently edited book is, From Patriarchy to Empowerment: Participation, Rights, and Women's Movements in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia (2007).
Vasuki Nesiah is a Senior Associate and head of the gender program at the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). She also leads the Center's work in South Asia. Originally from Sri Lanka , Vasuki Nesiah joined the ICTJ following a post-doctoral fellowship in teaching human rights law with the Human Rights Institute at Columbia Law School. She continues her Columbia University affiliation today as an adjunct associate professor teaching in the Human Rights Program of the School of Public and International Affairs (SIPA).
She has published and lectured in international and comparative law, feminist theory, law and development, postcolonial studies, constitutionalism, and governance in plural societies. She completed her doctorate in public international law at Harvard Law School, where she also received her JD. She holds a BA in philosophy and political science from Cornell University. She was also a visiting student of philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University.
Patrick Macklem is the William C. Graham Professor of Law at the University of Toronto. He holds law degrees from Harvard and Toronto, and an undergraduate degree in political science and philosophy from McGill. He served as Law Clerk for Chief Justice Brian Dickson of the Supreme Court of Canada and as a constitutional advisor to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. He is a recurring Visiting Professor at Central European University . He has been a Visiting Scholar at Stanford Law School and UCLA School of Law. In 2003, he was selected as a Fulbright New Century Scholar, taught at the European University Institute, and was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School . In 2006-2007, he was a Senior Global Research Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law. In 2007-2008, he is a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Professor Macklem's teaching interests include constitutional law, international human rights law, indigenous peoples, ethnic and cultural minorities, and labour law and policy. He is the author of Indigenous Difference and the Constitution of Canada (2001) (awarded the Canadian Political Science Association 2002 Donald Smiley Prize for best book on Canadian governance and the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences 2002 Harold Innis Prize by for the best English-language book in the social sciences), co-editor of Canadian Constitutional Law (2003); The Security of Freedom: Essays on Canada's Anti-terrorism Bill (2001), and Labour and Employment Law (2004), and has published numerous articles on constitutional law, labour law, indigenous peoples and the law, and international human rights law. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
2006-2007
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Rachel Holmes is a writer, broadcaster, columnist and reviewer. Formerly an academic, Holmes held lectureships in English at Queen Mary College, University of London and the University of Sussex. She is also the coordinator of Friends of the TAC, an international activist and lobbying organization that supports the Treatment Action Campaign in the fight for HIV and AIDS in South Africa. Her books include Scanty Particulars: The Life of Dr. James Barry (2002) and African Queen: the Real Life of the Hottentot Venus (2007). African Queen is a probing look at historical racism and sexual exploitation presented through the life of an extraordinary woman, Saartjie Baartmen, the so-called Hottentot Venus, exhibited in 1810 in London and Paris.
Robert D. King is the Audre and Bernard Rapoport Regents Chair of Jewish Studies and Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Texas. His current research and publication interests are three: the Yiddish language, especially in relation to what it tells us about Jewish history; the politics of language in general; and, third, the language politics of India in particular. Dr. King's most recent publications include Nehru and the Language Politics of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), and "Does One Nation Equal One Language?" (The Atlantic Monthly, April 1997). The thread that runs through Dr. King's current work is the relationship among language, ethnicity, nationhood, and politics in the largest sense of the word.
Derek Jinks is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Texas. His research and teaching interests include: public international law, international humanitarian law, human rights law, and criminal law. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Texas in 1991, M.A. and M.Phil. in sociology from Yale University in 1998 and 1999 respectively, and J.D. from Yale Law School in 1998. After law school, he clerked for Judge William C. Canby, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and worked in the Prosecutor's Office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. He has also worked as Senior Legal Advisor and United Nations Representative for the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre in India; and served in the delegation of the International Service for Human Rights at the Rome conference for the establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court. Since 2006, he has been a member of the U.S. Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on International Law. He is the author of The Rules of War: The Geneva Conventions in the Age of Terror (forthcoming Oxford University Press 2007) and International Humanitarian Law (forthcoming Oxford University Press 2008) (with Ryan Goodman).
Scott Sullivan is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Texas. He teaches and writes in foreign relations law and international law. Prior to joining UT, Professor Sullivan received his JD at the University of Chicago and a LL.M at the European University Institute while on a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship. He has practiced at private law firms in Chicago and New York advising companies on U.S. economic sanctions programs. Professor Sullivan has been extensively involved in the representation of several individuals detained at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Christine Kovic is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Houston, Clear Lake. Her previous research explores issues of indigenous rights and the Catholic Church in highland Chiapas. Kovic collaborated with the Diocesan-based Center for Human Rights Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas from 1993-1995, and conducted fieldwork with indigenous Catholics in one of the many colonias that surround the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Her publications include the books Mayan Voices for Human Rights (University of Texas, 2005) and Women in Chiapas (co-edited with Christine Eber, Routledge, 2003).
Julio Solórzano Foppa is a producer, writer and director from Mexico City. His professional life has been centered mostly around organizing and producing international cultural and artistic events. He has organized several Performing Arts Festivals, among them "The International Festival of the Caribbean Culture” and “Human Rights for the Artistic and Cultural Perspective.” He has been the producer and artistic director of several records, the writer and director of many radio programs, and the producer of two feature films, “Cabeza de Vaca” and “Cronos.” In 2000, he was the first Latin American appointed as a board member of the International Society for the Performing Arts. His mother, Alaíde Foppa, a feminist, poet, art critic and university professor, was kidnapped and disappeared on December 19, 1980, by the Guatemalan Army.
Andy Palacio is not only the most popular musician in Belize, he is also a serious music and cultural archivist with a deep commitment to preserving his unique Garifuna culture. Long a leading proponent of Garifuna popular music and a tireless advocate for the maintenance of the Garifuna language and traditions, Palacio has recently undertaken a new and ambitious direction with the formation of the Garifuna Collective. Born and raised in the coastal village of Barranco, it was while working with a literacy project on Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast in 1980 and discovering that the Garifuna language and culture was steadily dying in that country, that a strong cultural awareness took hold and his approach to music became more defined. While his academic background and self-scholarship allowed for his on-going documentation of Garifuna culture through lyrics and music, it has been his exuberance as a performer that gained him world-wide recognition. Palacio lives in Belize where he continues his work in promoting Culture and the Arts. In December 2004, he was appointed Cultural Ambassador and Deputy Administrator of the National Institute of Culture and History. In 2007, he and the Garifuna Collective will be embarking on an ambitious worldwide touring schedule in an effort to bring the beauty and power of Garifuna music to a wide audience.
Thomas Franck is Murry and Ida Becker Professor of Law Emeritus at New York University School of Law, where he was Director of the Center for International Studies from 1965-2002. He is one of the leading scholars in international law, and is a prolific writer whose publications include Fairness in International Law and Institutions. ( Oxford University Press, 1995) and most recently Recourse To Force: State Action Against Threats and Armed Attacks (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He teaches courses in international law and UN constitutional law. Professor Franck's interest in public international law is practical as well as theoretical. Indeed, he has acted as legal advisor or counsel to many foreign governments, including Tanganyika, Kenya, Zanzibar, Mauritius, Solomon Islands, El Salvador, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Chad. As an advocate before the International Court of Justice, he has successfully represented Chad and is currently representing Bosnia in a suit brought against Serbia under the Genocide Convention. He has served as a judge ad hoc (Indonesia/Malaysia) before the World Court from 2001-2002. He is a member of the Tribunal constituted under the Law of the Sea Treaty to hear the boundary dispute between Guyana and Suriname. And, from 1986 to the present, he serves on the Department of State Advisory Committee on International Law. Professor Franck is past President of the American Society of International Law (1998-2000) and served as editor-in-chief of the The American Journal of International Law from 1984-1993. Today, Franck lends his services to numerous organizations ranging from the American Branch of the International Law Association to the American Society of International Law.
Liliana Obregon is a professor of international law at Universidad de los Andes Law School in Bogotá, Colombia where she also directs the new international law program. She specializes in the history and theory of international law and international institutions in Latin America. She also studies comparative systems of human rights protection and third world approaches to international law. Her recent publications include “Between Civilization and Barbarism: Creole Interventions in International Law” ( Third World Quarterly ). She is c o-author of Colombia Venezuela: crisis o negociación (Colombia Venezuela: Crisis or Negotiation). ( Tercer Mundo Editores).
Amr Shalakany is Assistant Professor of Law at the American University in Cairo, where he also directs the LL.M program. Before joining AUC, Professor Shalakany was the Jeremiah Smith Junior Visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard Law School, where he taught Comparative Law and Islamic Law. He also served as legal advisor to the PLO Negotiations Support Unit in Ramallah during the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process, and taught at Birzeit University and helped set up the Law Clinic there. He also worked as a securities lawyer with the law firm of Baker & McKenzie in London. His publications include “The Origins of Comparative Law in the Arab World, or how sometimes losing your Asalah can be Good for you,” in Rethinking Masters of Comparative Law , and “Arbitration and the Third World: Bias under the Scepter of Neo-Liberalism,” in the Harvard International Law Journal.
Denise Gilman is currently a Georgetown University L.L.M. student and Teaching Fellow at the Georgetown University Law Center, where she co-teaches an Asylum clinic. During her time at Georgetown she has directly represented clients in proceedings before the Department of Homeland Security and immigration court. After graduating from Columbia Law School, Ms. Gilman clerked for the Honorable Judge Thomas M. Reavley of the Fifth Circuit before entering into a distinguished career in human rights. Before returning to school Ms. Gilman worked as an attorney for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights where she represented Guatemala and Colombia. While with Human Rights First, she worked to implement a project to combat the use of torture to obtain confessions in criminal proceedings in Mexico. She also worked for the Washington Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights and Urban Affairs, representing political asylum seekers. Her publications include “Calling the United States’ Bluff: How Sovereign Immunity Undermines the United States’ Claim to an Effective Domestic Human Rights System,” in the Georgetown Law Journal (forthcoming), and “A Disabling Environment: Governmental Restrictions on Freedom of Association of Human Rights NGOs in Mexico” in the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (1999).
Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo (CIESAS, Mexico , D.F.) is an anthropologist and activist who lived for fifteen years in Chiapas . She earned her doctorate in anthropology from Stanford University. She currently works under the auspices of CIESAS, the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology. One of her projects involves exploring new and old opportunities for power through indigenous women, collective organization, and daily resistance by analyzing the comparative histories of indigenous women's initiatives in Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Veracruz. She has worked extensively in the past on exploring plural identities in Chiapas as well as the human rights of Guatemalan refugees in Mexico. Hernandez Castillo lectured at the University of London Instititute of Latin American Studies on "Indigenous Law and Identity Politics in Mexico: Women's Struggles in a Multicultural Nation" and "Indigenous Cosmovision as an Element of Resistance in the Struggles of Indigenous Women in Mesoamerica." She is also on the Humanities Awards Commission for the Academia Mexicana de Ciencias. Her publications include: El Estado y los indígenas en tiempos del PAN: neoindigenismo, identidad y legalidad (2004), Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias: the Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas and the Zapatista Rebellion (2003); and The Other Word: Women and Violence in Chiapas Before and After Acteal (2001).
