Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire

Born in Holland in 1946, Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Roméo Dallaire O.C., C.M.M., M.S.C., C.D., LL.D. joined the Canadian army in 1964 and served for 35 years. He was the Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR) in 1993-4 which, under-equipped and under-manned, was forced to watch helplessly as 800,000 Rwandan civilians were murdered. The failure of the United Nations and the international community to respond to the gravity of the situation in Rwanda is chronicled in his book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (2003), written in collaboration with Major Beardsley, which won the Shaughnessy Cohen Award for Political Writing in 2003 and the 2004 Governor General's Award for non-fiction. After his return from Rwanda, he served as Deputy-Commander of the Canadian Army and Assistant Deputy Minister of National Defence. He is now Special Advisor to the Canadian International Development Agency, and to the Minister of International Co-operation on War-Affected Children, and Advisor to the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade on the Prohibition of Small Arms Distribution. Lt.-Gen. Dallaire has been invested in the Order of Canada and has also been awarded the United States Legion of Merit. He was the first recipient of the Aegis Award on Genocide Prevention from the United Kingdom in 2002, for his efforts to prevent and curtail the genocide in Rwanda. His return to Rwanda ten years after the genocide is the subject of a powerful documentary film, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire (2004). In 2005, Lt.-Gen. Dallaire was appointed to the Canadian Senate, representing the province of Quebec. He lectures widely on matters relating to genocide, post-traumatic stress disorder, war-affected children and control of small arms distribution. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University, where his research focuses on the generation of political will for action in situations of massive atrocities.

Juan Méndez

Juan Méndez served as the first United Nations Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide from 2004 to 2007, prior to which he was President of the International Center for Transitional Justice. A native of Lomas de Zamora, Argentina, Mr. Méndez has dedicated his legal career to the defence of human rights and has a long and distinguished record of advocacy throughout the Americas. As a result of his involvement in representing political prisoners, he was arrested and subjected to torture and administrative detention for a year and a half during the Argentinean military dictatorship. During this time, Amnesty International adopted him as a "prisoner of conscience". After his release from detention in the late 1970s, Mr. Méndez moved to the United States.

For 15 years, he worked with Human Rights Watch, concentrating his efforts on human rights issues in the western hemisphere, and helping to build the organization into one of the most widely respected in the world. In 1994, he became general counsel of Human Rights Watch, with worldwide duties in support of the organization's mission, including responsibility for the organization's litigation and standard-setting activities. From 1996 to 1999, Mr. Méndez was the executive director of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights in Costa Rica. Between October 1999 and May 2004 he was professor of law and director of the Centre for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Between 2000 and 2003 he was a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, and served as president in 2002.

He has taught international human rights law at Georgetown Law School and at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and he teaches regularly at the Oxford Master's Programme in International Human Rights Law in the United Kingdom. He is the recipient of several human rights awards, the most recent being the inaugural Monsignor Oscar A. Romero Award for Leadership in Service to Human Rights from the University of Dayton in April 2000, and the Jeanne and Joseph Sullivan Award from the Heartland Alliance in May 2003.

Martha L. Minow

Professor Martha Minow is the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she teaches Family Law and Civil Procedure and is Chair of the Scholars Board of Facing History and Ourselves. She is the author of many books, including Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (1998), which was awarded the American Society of International Law Certificate of Merit in 2000, and Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law and Repair (2002). Before entering teaching, Professor Minow was a law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall, and for Judge David Bazelon. She received her J.D. from Yale, her Ed.M. from Harvard, and her A.B. from the University of Michigan. She has served on the Independent International Commission on Kosovo and helped to launch Imagine Co-existence, a program of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, to promote peaceful development in post-conflict societies.











Frank Chalk

Professor Frank Chalk (Ph.D., History, University of Wisconsin) has published widely on the subject of genocide, and is the co-author, with Prof. Kurt Jonassohn, of The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (Yale University Press, 1990). He has lectured and presented papers on genocide at conferences and universities around the world and before the Prosecution Staff of the International Criminal Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda at The Hague. He has served as President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (June 1999-June 2001), and is a past president of the Canadian Association of African Studies. He is the Director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the history and sociology of genocide, the Holocaust, and the history of United States foreign relations. During his sabbatical leave in the academic year 2000-2001, Professor Chalk was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.

Professor Chalk's most recent publications include chapters on "Hate Radio in Rwanda," published in The Path of A Genocide: The Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaire, Howard Adelman and Astri Suhrke, editors (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1999) and "Radio Broadcasting in the Incitement and Interdiction of Gross Violations of Human Rights, including Genocide," in Genocide: Essays Toward Understanding, Early Warning, and Prevention, Roger Smith, editor (Association of Genocide Scholars, 1999). Together with Dinah Shelton, Howard Adelman, Alexander Kiss, and William Schabas, he was an editor of the three-volume Macmillan USA (Thomson Gale) Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, which was published in November 2004.









Ben Kiernan

Professor Ben Kiernan obtained his Ph.D. from Monash University, Australia, in 1983, and is now the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History at Yale University. In 1998 he founded the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University's MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, an interdisciplinary, inter-regional program that researches comparative and policy issues relating to the phenomenon of genocide. Professor Kiernan has also served as director of the Cambodian Genocide Program since 1994, where he was instrumental in unearthing and disclosing documents attesting to genocidal crimes of the Khmer Rouge regime, through research supported by the U.S. State Department.

Professor Kiernan is the author of Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (2007), Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor (2007),How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930-1975 (1985, 2004), Cambodia: The Eastern Zone Massacres (1986), The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (1996, 2002), and Le Génocide au Cambodge, 1975-1979: Race, idéologie, et pouvoir (1998). He is the co-author of Khmers Rouges ! Matériaux pour l'histoire du communisme au Cambodge (1981), Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1942-1981 (1982), and Cambodge: Histoire et enjeux (1986). His edited collection Conflict and Change in Cambodia won the Critical Asian Studies Prize for 2002. He is also the editor of Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations, and the International Community (1993), and Burchett: Reporting the Other Side of the World, 1939-1983 (1986), and co-editor of Revolution and Its Aftermath in Kampuchea (1983), Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976-1977 (1988), and The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (2003).




Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka is a leading voice for dignity through freedom for Nigeria, Africa and the world. Educated in Nigeria and England, Soyinka has taught English literature in various Nigerian universities, as well as Cambridge, Sheffield and Yale. He was imprisoned on conspiracy charges for 22 months until 1969 for writing an article suggesting a ceasefire with Biafra rebels. He was charged with treason again by Nigeria's military dictatorship in March 1997. His work as a novelist, dramatist and poet explore both questions of culture and the individual's relation to power. In 1986 the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Soyinka, "who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence". More recently, he gave the 2004 Reith Lecture, entitled "Climate of Fear."

Soyinka has written extensively. His collected poems include Idanre, and Other Poems (1967), Poems from Prison (1969), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972), Ogun Abibiman (1976) and Mandela's Earth and Other Poems (1988). His two novels are The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy (1973), as well as autobiographical works, The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972) and Aké (1981) and The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis (1996) and You Must Set Forth at Dawn: a Memoir (2006). Soyinka has written many plays, including The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel (1963), The Strong Breed (1963), The Trial of Brother Jero (1963) and Jero's Metamorphosis (1973), A Dance of the Forests (1963), The Road (1965), Kongi's Harvest (1967), Madmen and Specialists (1971), Death and the King's Horseman (1975), A Play of Giants (1984), Requiem for a Futurologist (1985), From Zia With Love (1992) and The Beatification of Area Boy (1995).




Hon. Gareth Evans, AO QC

After a 21 year career as a politician and sometimes Cabinet Minister, Gareth Evans became the President of the International Crisis Group (ICG) in January 2000. The renowned Brussels-based ICG is an "independent global NGO working with some 120 full-time staff on five continents to prevent and resolve deadly conflict." As Australia's Foreign Minister (1988-96), Evans helped create the UN peace deal for Cambodia. Evans was Co-Chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which published The Responsibility to Protect in December 2001. He was also a member and co-author of the UN Secretary General's High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (2004), the Blix-led Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (2006) and the Zedillo-led International Task Force on Global Public Goods (2006). At present he is a member of the UN Secretary-General's Advisory Committee on Genocide Prevention.

Evans has written and edited eight books, including Cooperating for Peace: The Global Agenda for the 1990s and Beyond (1993) and Australia's Foreign Relations (1995). He has also published nearly 100 journal articles and chapters on foreign relations, human rights, and legal and constitutional reform. Articles relating to genocide include "Crimes against humanity: overcoming indifference" and "Conflict Prevention and Resolution". Evans publishes regular op-ed articles for the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times and other major newspapers.




Yehuda Bauer

Born in Prague in 1926, Dr. Bauer is an historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He attended Cardiff University in Wales, interrupting his studies to fight in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, after which he completed his degree. He received his doctorate in 1960 and the following year began teaching at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University. He served on the central committee of Mapam, then the junior partner party of Israel's ruling Mapai (Israel Labour Party), and was a visiting professor at Brandeis University, Yale University, Richard Stockton College, and Clark University. He was the founding editor of the Journal for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and served on the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust.

In recent years, Dr. Bauer has received recognition for his work in the field of Holocaust studies and the prevention of genocide. In 1998, he was the recipient of the Israel Prize, the highest civilian award in Israel. In 2001, he was elected a Member of the Israeli Academy of Science. Currently, he serves as Professor of Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem and Hebrew University, academic adviser to the International Task Force for Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research, and senior adviser to the Swedish Government on the International Forum on Genocide Prevention.

Gérard Prunier

Gérard Prunier is a research fellow at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris and Director of the French Centre for Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He received a PhD in African History in 1981 from the University of Paris and joined the CNRS in 1984. Prunier has done extensive research on Eastern Africa and the Horn of Africa, and has published over 120 articles and five books including Les Ethnies ont une histoire (ed. with Jean-Pierre Chrétien), L'Ouganda et la question indienne : 1896-1972, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, Le Kenya contemporain, (ed. with François Grignon), Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, From Genocide to Continental War: The "Congolese" Conflict and the Crisis of Contemporary Africa. He was a key figure in the French Ministry of Defense’s crisis unit in Rwanda, which oversaw France’s intervention in Rwanda in Operation Turquoise. He did an interview with Harper's Magazine in August 2006: "Did Somebody Say Genocide?: Gérard Prunier on Darfur", and recently wrote online about "Darfur's Sudan problem."

Alison Des Forges

A historian trained at Harvard and Yale universities, Alison Des Forges left academic life to work full-time in the defense of human rights during the Rwandan genocide. She has provided authoritative analyses based on wide contacts and extensive field work in the region and she is currently Senior Advisor to Human Rights Watch. She directed research projects in Rwanda documenting the genocide and monitoring the situation, and follows developments in Burundi and those in the Democratic Republic of Congo related to Rwanda and Burundi. The research on the genocide, based on analysis of government documents as well as extensive interviews with survivors and accused killers, resulted in a meticulously detailed book titled Leave None To Tell the Story. Des Forges has provided documents, advice, and expert testimony to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and to national courts in Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, and the U.S. She co-chaired the 1994 International Commission that investigated massive slaughter in Burundi.

Rebecca Hamilton

Rebecca Hamilton graduated from Harvard Law School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government this year. She is a Representative of the Genocide Intervention Network through which she is working to build a permanent political constituency against genocide and mass atrocity. She co-founded the Harvard Darfur Action Group, a cross-campus organization which was involved in Harvard's precedent-setting decision to divest from companies supporting the Sudanese government. As a Chayes International Public Service Fellow, Rebecca spent the summer of 2005 working as a legal clerk to the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Before starting law school she worked in Sudan, where she executed a plan to help Sudan's internally displaced population. Rebecca is currently researching the impact of Darfur advocacy on the decision-making of the Executive branch of the US Government, and recently co-authored, "Not On Our Watch" - about the formation of the US civil society movement for Darfur, published in War In Darfur and the Search for Peace (Harvard University Press, 2007). Rebecca has written op-eds in the International Herald Tribune: Sudan After Garang: Saving the Peace, and Boston Globe: Who Says Student Activism is Dead? and has also authored an article on R2P for the Harvard Human Rights Journal, " The Responsibility to Protect: From Document to Doctrine-But What of Implementation?"




Audrey Macklin

Audrey Macklin is an associate professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. She holds law degrees from Yale and Toronto, and a bachelor of science degree from Alberta. After graduating from Toronto, she served as law clerk to Mme Justice Bertha Wilson at the Supreme Court of Canada. She was appointed to the faculty of Dalhousie Law School in 1991, promoted to Associate Professor 1998, and moved to the University of Toronto in 2000. While teaching at Dalhousie, she also served as a member of the Immigration and Refugee Board. Professor Macklin teaches criminal law, administrative law, and immigration and refugee law. Her research and writing interests include transnational migration, citizenship, forced migration, feminist and cultural analysis, and human rights. She completed a project, with Georgette Gagnon and Penelope Simons, entitled Deconstructing Engagement: Corporate Self-Regulation in Conflict Zones - Implications for Human Rights and Canadian Public Policy, examining the existing governance gap in the accountability of transnational corporations for violations of international human rights and humanitarian law associated with their extraterritorial operations.




William A. Schabas

Currently the director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, Professor Schabas was educated at the University of Toronto and the University of Montreal. In May 2002, the President of Sierra Leone appointed Professor Schabas to the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission upon the recommendation of Mary Robinson, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. He served as one of three international commissioners throughout the activities of the Commission, from 2002 to 2004.

Professor Schabas has written numerous books dealing in whole or in part with international human rights law, and has published more than 170 articles in academic journals. He has often participated in international human rights missions on behalf of non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International (International Secretariat), the International Federation of Human Rights, and the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development to Rwanda, Burundi, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Cambodia and Guyana. He is legal counsel to Amnesty International Ireland. He has worked as a consultant or independent expert on behalf of various governments and international organizations. He is a member of the board of several international human rights organizations and institutions, including the International Institute for Criminal Investigations, of which he is chair. William Schabas is an Officer of the Order of Canada.




Luis Moreno-Ocampo

Luis Moreno Ocampo, the current Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court rose to prominence as the assistant prosecutor of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons in the 1984-1985 "Military Junta" in Argentina. As District Attorney for the Federal Circuit of the City of Buenos Aires from 1987 to 1992, he was in charge prosecuting the military responsible for the Falklands war (1988), those who headed the military rebellions in 1988, and has not shied away from many large public corruption cases. He has worked with both the Inter-American Development Bank and the United Nations, aiding governments to establish systems to control corruption. He was the co-founder of Poder Ciudadano, a non-governmental organization which promotes citizen responsibility and participation. In his role as Chief Prosecutor for the ICC he has investigated the abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the insurgency of the Uganda-based Lord's Resistance Army and the Darfur conflict of western Sudan. Mr. Moreno Ocampo is an active member of the Advisory Committee of Transparency International. His publications include In Self Defense, How to Avoid Corruption (1993) and When Power Lost the Trial: How to Explain the Dictatorship to Our Children (1996). He continues to serve as Associate Professor of criminal law at the University of Buenos Aires.




Sir Shridath "Sonny" Ramphal

Sir Shridath Ramphal is the former Secretary-General of the British Commonwealth. He is Co-Chair of the Commission on Global Governance, President of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), and Chair of the International Steering Committee of the Rockefeller Foundation's Leadership in Environmental and Development (LEAD) Programme. He has served on numerous independent international commissions which considered global issues including: the Brandt Commission, the Palme Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, the Brundtland Commission on Environment and Development, the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues, and the South Commission. Shridath Ramphal was Chair of the West Indian Commission, whose report, provided to Caribbean Heads of Government in 1992, made detailed recommendations for the future of the region. In 1991, he was a Special Advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). His book, Our Country, the Planet: Forging a Partnership for Survival, was written for the conference and has been published in several languages. He is a member of the board of directors of Innovative Communications Corporation and was honored by the government of India as the 2002 recipient of the prestigious "Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development".




Irwin Cotler

Professor Irwin Cotler has taught constitutional law, international human rights law, law and poverty, Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, discrimination and the law, civil liberties, and comparative and international protection of minorities' rights. His main research areas are freedom of expression and assaultive speech, equality law, peace and human rights, and comparative constitutional law. Professor Cotler was Chair of InterAmicus, the International Human Rights Advocacy Centre based at McGill Law Faculty; and Co-Chair of the Canadian Helsinki Watch Group. He has defended political prisoners in Peru, Tunisia, China (KunLun Zhang), Nigeria (Wole Soyinka), Indonesia, South Africa (Nelson Mandela) and Russia (Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Nikitin) and he has addressed major academic gatherings in Washington, Moscow and Jerusalem. He has argued before the Supreme Courts of both Canada and Israel and he has testified before parliamentary committees in Canada, the United States, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Israel and various Latin American countries. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, a member of the Académie universelle des cultures, and was awarded the Justice Walter Tarnopolsky Memorial Medal, the Medal of the Bar of Montréal, and the Martin Luther King Jr Humanitarian Award. In 1999, Professor Cotler took a leave of absence from the Faculty of Law and was elected Member of Parliament for the federal constituency of Mount Royal. He was appointed Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada in 2003. Professor Cotler’s work in genocide prevention and persecution of criminals has received international attention. He has worked tirelessly to bring Nazi war criminals to justice and convey the magnitude of the Darfur crisis to the public. Most recently he is working to indict Iranian President Ahmadinejad for incitement to genocide under the UN Charter and the Genocide Convention.

Catherine Lu

Professor Catherine Lu teaches in the areas of political theory and international relations, and has taught courses on contemporary liberalism and theories of justice; the history of international relations thought; international ethics; and problems of post-conflict justice and reconciliation. She is the author of Just and Unjust Interventions in World Politics: Public and Private (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and has published articles in The Journal ofPolitical Philosophy, International Studies Review, Ethics and International Affairs, International Relations, and Review of International Studies, on themes such as justice, cosmopolitanism, moral regeneration after war, and the role of human rights in contexts oftransitional justice. Currently she is Reviews Editor for Ethics and International Affairs (Blackwell), the journal of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (New York). In 2004-5, she was a faculty fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University. She was also the guest editor of the December 2004 special issue of International Relations on ‘Evil and International Affairs.’ Currently, she is completing a book project on the problem of moral regeneration following war, atrocity and oppression. Her next research project will be on cosmopolitanism, humanitarianism and the use of force in world politics.

Frédéric Mégret

Professor Frédéric Mégret joined McGill from the University of Toronto in July 2006 as the Canada Research Chair in the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism. He holds an LlB from King’s College London and a PhD from the University of Paris I and the Graduate Institute of International Studies (Geneva), as well as a diploma from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. He has worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross, assisted the defense of one of the accused before the ICTR, was a member of the French delegation to the Rome conference on the creation of the International Criminal Court, and acted as a consultant for the Liberian Ministry of Defense. He is the author of Le Tribunal pénal international pour le Rwanda (Pedone, 2002) and a co-editor with Professor Philip Alston of the second edition of The United Nations and Human Rights: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2004), as well as articles on international criminal justice, human rights and international humanitarian law. He served with the French army as a blue helmet in UNPROFOR in 1995. He is currently working on a major research project funded by the Social Sciences Research Council on “Resisting Oppression: Civil Disobedience, Armed Struggle and International Law”. He is the Director of the McGill Legal Clinic for the Special Court for Sierra Leone.




Douglas Greenberg

Dr. Douglas Greenberg is a Professor of History at the University of Southern California and the Executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. Established in 1994 by Steven Spielberg, the Shoah Foundation was charged with the mission of collecting 50,000 oral histories from survivors of the Holocaust. Under the guidance of Dr. Greenberg it has surpassed this goal and the current total is over 52,000 histories in thirty-two languages. Dr. Greenberg was originally an historian of early American law. Previously, he was President and CEO of the Chicago Historical Society and Vice President of the American Council of Learned Societies. He has published several books and numerous articles on aspects of American history, the Holocaust and genocide, the impact of technology on scholarship, and public history.

James M. Smith

Dr. James M Smith is Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of the Aegis Trust, a UK-based genocide prevention organization. Aegis, which was launched in 2000, is based at the UK Holocaust Centre, which James established with his brother Stephen in 1995. Aegis created the Kigali Memorial Centre in Rwanda and launched the 'Protect Darfur' campaign in 1995. During the crisis in Kosovo in 1999, Dr. Smith jointly initiated the East Midlands Kosovo Appeal and worked with the International Medical Corps in Albania and Kosovo as a volunteer physician. He graduated from the University of Leeds School of Medicine in 1993 and most recently held a part time position as a Staff Grade Doctor in Emergency Medicine at the Queens Medical Centre, Nottingham. He is the editor of Will Genocide Ever End? (Paragon, 2002) with Professors Carol Rittner and John K. Roth.

Gary J. Bass

Gary J. Bass is Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals, and Freedom's Battle (forthcoming from Knopf). He is a former Washington reporter and West Coast correspondent for The Economist. He has also written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, and other publications.

Mark Doyle

Mark Doyle is an internationally acclaimed journalist who joined the BBC in 1986 and went on to become the East Africa Correspondent from 1993 to 1994 and West Africa Correspondent from 1997 to 2002. He covered the Rwandan genocide extensively for TV and radio in 1994 and was often the only foreign correspondent in the capital Kigali. He also covered the West African wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea throughout the late 1990s. Mr. Doyle is currently a BBC World Affairs Correspondent. In 2004 he was awarded first prize in the United Nations Correspondents Association UN Foundation Awards (Reporting on Humanitarian and Developmental Affairs category) for his coverage of post-war Liberia.

Howard Wolpe

Howard Wolpe is the Director of the Africa Program as well as the Project on Leadership and Building State Capacity at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars. A seven-term member of the Unites States Congress, Dr. Wolpe received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Wolpe is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and of Africare. He has written extensively on Africa, American foreign policy, and the management of ethnic and racial conflict. Currently, Dr. Wolpe is working on a book based on his diplomatic experience with the Burundi peace process and is directing several post-conflict leadership training programs in Africa.

Taner Akçam

Taner Akçam - sociologist, historian and writer - was born in Ardahan province, Turkey, in 1953. He was grantedpolitical asylum in Germany after receiving a ten-year prison sentence for his involvement in revolutionary politics, which resulted in his adoption in 1976 by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience. He is the author of ten scholarly works of history and sociology, as well as numerous articles in Turkish, German and English. His latest publication is A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (Metropolitan Books, 2006). Professor Akçam was one of the first academics to openly discuss the Armenian genocide by the Turkish Ottoman government in 1915. He is currently Visiting Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota.

Michael Ignatieff

Michael Ignatieff is the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Canadian House of Commons. He is an author, journalist, documentary film-maker, and academic who has held positions at the Cambridge, Oxford, University of Toronto and Harvard, where he was the Carr Professor and the Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Stemming from his dramatic first-hand accounts of countries struggling with conflict, Michael Ignatieff’s expertise in human rights, security, and foreign affairs has made him a valued advisor to a number of national governments, and a respected contributor to prominent international commissions and working groups. In 2001, he was the Canadian representative on the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, an effort to codify the international community's responsibility and right to protect people on humanitarian grounds when they are unable to defend themselves from persecution. His 1993 book Blood and Belonging explores the duality of nationalism, from Yugoslavia to Northern Ireland. The Warrior's Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (1998) deals with ethnically motivated conflicts, including the conflicts in Afghanistan and Rwanda. Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (2000) which describes the problems of modern peacekeeping with special reference to the NATO presence in Kosovo, won the George Orwell Prize. His three most recent books are Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan (2003), The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (2004) and American Exceptionalism and Human Rights (2005).

Jan Pronk

Jan Pronk is a distinguished Dutch politician and diplomat. As Minister of Development Cooperation, and later Minister for the Environment, he radically changed the development cooperation-policy of the Netherlands by changing its focus to the equal distribution of power and wealth in the world. He was Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) from 1980 to 1985, Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1985 to 1986, and served as the Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in 2002. He served as a member of the Commission on Global Governance from 1991-1995 and as Co-Chairman of the Global Coalition for Africa from 1991-1998. Since 2002 he has been Affiliated Professor of Theory and Practice of International Development at the Institute for Social Studies in The Hague, and has edited a book called Catalysing Development: A Debate on Aid (2004.)Jan Pronk was the Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations in Sudan from 2004 until 2006, where he led the UN peace keeping operation (UNMIS). In September 2006 he asked that a “month of tranquility” be observed during Ramadan. This call for an implicit ceasefire as well as his critical comments with regard to the crisis in Darfur, available at his website http://www.janpronk.nl/, resulted in the Sudanese government calling for his dismissal and declaring him persona non grata.

 

 

Wiebe Arts

Wiebe Arts is a former Dutch Infantry NCO (1984-2000) and a Public Information Officer and Historian at the Dutch Veterans' Institute. As a member of the Royal Netherlands Army, he served as a peacekeeper of the United Nations Protection Force for the Former Yugoslavia (UNPROFOR) in the east Bosnian town of Srebrenica, a UN 'safe area,' between January and April 1995. On July 11 1995, 1,500 Bosnian Serb soldiers overran the enclave and bussed "the able-bodied" Muslim men and boys away to be summarily executed. Some 450 Dutchbat III troops were present when Srebrenica fell, and some - ignorant of what was to come - are reported to have helped the Bosnian Serb army separate the men and boys from their families before they were led off and killed. Nearly 7,000 people died. Several inquiries have absolved Dutchbat of blame for the events leading up to the massacre. In November 1999, the UN released a highly self-critical report on its performance, stating that "Through error, misjudgment and the inability to recognize the scope of evil confronting us, we failed to do our part to save the people of Srebrenica from the Serb campaign of mass murder."

 

Colette Braeckman

Colette Braeckman is a journalist with the french-language Belgian newspaper Le Soir and a frequent contributor to Le Monde diplomatique. She is known for her expertise on African affairs, in particular Central Africa. She is the author of Le dinosaure: le Zaïre de Mobutu (1992), Rwanda: histoire d'un génocide (1994), Terreur africaine. Burundi, Rwanda, Zaïre: les racines de la violence (1996), L'enjeu congolais: l'Afrique centrale après Mobutu (1999), and Les nouveaux prédateurs: politique des puissances en Afrique centrale (2003). Most recently, Ms. Braeckman has been covering the Congo elections and their aftermath for Le Soir.

Peter Leuprecht

Peter Leuprecht gained his Doctor of Laws from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, where he became an Assistant Lecturer.  Professor Leuprecht was an official in the Secretariat General of the Council of Europe (Strasbourg, France), where from 1980 to 1993 he was Director of Human Rights, before being elected Deputy Secretary-General in 1993.  Professor Leuprecht has taught at the Universities of Strasbourg and Nancy in France and at the European Academy of Law in Florence in Italy. He was Dean of the Faculty of Law of McGill University from 1999 to 2003. He was awarded the “Prix du Civisme Européen” in 1991 and the Human Rights Award of the Lord Reading Law Society in 2001.  He was a member of a committee of four ‘Sages’ which prepared a human rights agenda for the European Union.  In August 2000, he was appointed the Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the UN for human rights in Cambodia.  Currently he is the Director of the Montreal Institute of International Studies and Professor at the Département des sciences juridiques de l’UQAM, and he also serves as advisor to the Canadian Department of Justice.  He is the author of numerous publications in the field of international law and human rights.

Ali B. Ali-Dinar

A native of El Fasher in Northern Darfur, Dr. Ali B. Ali-Dinar is the grandson of the last king of Darfur, Sultan Ali-Dinar. Dr. Ali B. Ali-Dinar obtained his BA and MA from the University of Khartoum, Sudan, and his Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995. Since October 1994, Dr. Dinar has worked as the Outreach Director with the University of Pennsylvania's African Studies Center. He is the founder of "Darfur Information Center", an on-line source for information about the Darfur region of western Sudan and has given many speeches, interviews and presentations about Darfur, including at Georgetown University, Cornell, Swarthmore College, the U.S. Holocaust Museum, and the United Nations. Dr. Dinar was the past Chair of the Electronic Technology Group, the current president of the Sudan Studies Association, USA, chair of the Outreach Council of the African Studies Association in the USA, and president of the Philadelphia-based Darfur Alert Coalition.

Mark Thompson

Dr. Mark Thompson, independent evaluator and journalist, is the author of Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina (London, 1994 and 1999), a widely acclaimed analysis of the role that media played in the final crisis and breakdown of Yugoslavia. The book has been translated into Croatian and Serbian, and the 1999 edition was chosen as one of the ‘Books of the Year’ by two British newspapers, The Guardian and The Observer.  He also wrote A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia (1992) and contributed to Unfinished Peace, the 1996 report of the International Commission on the Balkans. In 1999, Thompson wrote a long report for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) on international assistance to the media in former Yugoslavia, which he presented to the OSCE Permanent Council in Vienna.  He also co-edited and co-authored, with Monroe Price, Forging Peace: Intervention, Human rights and the Management of Media Space (Edinburgh, 2002), the first full-length study of the roles that media can play in post-conflict reconstruction.  In 1994 and 1995, he directed the Media Analysis Unit within UNPROFOR, the UN mission to the former Yugoslavia. In 1998 and 1999, he was the first Spokesman and Director of Media Affairs within the enlarged OSCE Mission to Croatia.  In 2004 Thompson directed a project for the Netherlands NGO, Press Now, resulting in a report surveying the media development activities of OSCE missions in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, and in 2005 he moderated an international conference on this topic at the Netherlands Foreign Ministry.  In 2005, he was an expert witness on media at the ICTY trial of Momcilo Krajisnik, one of the wartime leaders of the Bosnian Serbs.  In recent years, he has worked as a freelance media-policy consultant for the Danish Foreign Ministry, the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office, the UK Department for International Development, International Media Support (Denmark), International IDEA (Sweden), Article 19 (UK), the Open Society Institute (OSI, Budapest and London), and as Balkans Programme Director of the International Crisis Group.






Stephen Toope

Professor Stephen Toope is the 12th President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of British Columbia, and was Dean of the McGill Faculty of Law from 1994 to 1999.  He earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in History and Literature in 1979, law degrees from McGill University in 1983, and a PhD from Cambridge University in 1987.  He teaches and researches in the areas of Public International Law and International Dispute Resolution. A former President of the Canadian Council on International Law and member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, Professor Toope has published on international dispute resolution, international environmental law, human rights, the use of force, and international legal theory in leading international journals. He was a co-winner of the Francis Deák Prize of the American Society of International Law. Professor Toope is a regular advisor to Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the Canadian International Development Agency and the Department of Justice, and also sits on the boards of several non-governmental organisations that promote human rights and international development, including the Canadian Human Rights Foundation and the World University Service of Canada. He has conducted human rights seminars for government officials in Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, and was a member of the UN observer delegation to the first post-apartheid South African elections. He served as Research Director, Office of the Special Representative concerning the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People in 1991, and since 2002 he has been on the Board of the United Nations Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances.






Allan Thompson

Allan Thompson is an Assistant Professor at Carleton University's School of Journalism and Communication.  He gained his Bachelor of Journalism from Carleton in 1986, and then gained a Masters degree in International Relations at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He joined the faculty at Carleton in 2003 after spending 17 years as a reporter with the Toronto Star, Canada's largest circulation daily newspaper. Professor Thompson worked for ten years as a correspondent for The Star on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, reporting on foreign affairs, defence and immigration issues, and has undertaken assignments in such places as Rwanda, Zaire, Sierra Leone and Kazakhstan.  He first reported from Rwanda for The Star in 1996 during the mass exodus of Rwandan refugees from eastern Zaire, and has been back several times since to develop a series of feature articles. He also chronicled Romeo Dallaire's career in a series of reports for The Star and reported on Dallaire’s testimony before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He is now head of a media-capacity-building project called The Rwanda Initiative, which involves a partnership between Carleton's journalism school and the National University of Rwanda.  His first book is the edited collection The Media and the Rwanda Genocide (2007) which has just been published by Pluto Press, Fountain Publishers and the International Development Research Centre. 

 

Christian Mumenthaler

Christian Mumenthaler is Head of Risk Management and Chief Risk Officer of the Swiss Re Group, a leading reinsuring company and expert in risk securitization solutions. In a landmark decision Swiss Re established a long-term partnership with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to form the ICRC Corporate Support Group mandated with “strengthening and developing humanitarian law and universal humanitarian principles”. Mr. Mumenthaler received a PhD from the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biophysics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Before joining Swiss Re in 1999, he was an Associate at the Boston Consulting Group. He is deeply committed to ensuring that business contributes to a sustainable future and good governance around the world. In addition to his business obligations he is Vice Chairman of the International Risk Governance Council; member of the Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance, a philanthropic initiative charged with providing a forum for discussing complex global challenges; member of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development; and a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.






Salih Mahmoud Osman

Salih Mahmoud Osman, a human rights activist and lawyer from the Darfur region of Sudan, was the 2006 recipient of the highest award given by Human Rights Watch for his courage in defending and providing legal representation to those who have been detained and tortured by the Sudanese government for the past twenty years.  His dedication to humanitarian causes has not gone unpunished.  In 2004 Mr. Osman was arrested by the Sudanese government and held without charge for seven months, being released only after going on a hunger strike. Working with and inspiring organizations such as Save Darfur and the Sudanese Organization Against Torture, Mr. Osman has also become an opposition member in parliament, working towards legal reform while at the same time continuing to provide legal aid in Nyala in southern Darfur and in Khartoum.

Brian Stewart

One of Canada’s most experienced foreign correspondents and journalists, Brian Stewart is the host of the foreign affairs show CBC News: Our World as well as senior correspondent of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's principal news hour The National .  In 1994 he received a Gemini Award for "Rwanda: Autopsy of a Genocide,"  in which he uncovered advanced warnings of the mass murders that were disregarded. Two years later, he won the Gemini for "Best Overall Broadcast Journalist." Stewart has reported from nine war zones and has worked extensively in underdeveloped countries. He was the first North American reporter to draw attention to the Ethiopian famine in 1984 and his report on child slavery during the Sudan Civil War, Sudan: Children of Darkness, won several international awards, including the UNDA prize at the Monte Carlo Television Festival in 1989.

Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid Al-Hussein

Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid Al-Hussein is Jordan’s Ambassador to the United States. Born in Amman, Prince Zeid was educated at Johns Hopkins University and completed a Ph.D in history at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He has served in the Jordanian Armed Forces, and is the author of several publications on Jordanian and Arab history.  From 2000-2007 he was Jordan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, following a four-year stint as Jordan’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN. In 2006 he was an official candidate to succeed Kofi Annan as UN Secretary-General.  He was instrumental in the creation of the International Criminal Court, chairing the UN’s informal working group on elements for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity for the Preparatory Commission for the ICC. In September 2002 Prince Zeid was elected as the first President of the ICC’s governing body, a post he held for three years.  He served as a political officer in the UN peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslavia (UNPROFOR) from 1994 to 1996.  Following allegations of sexual abuse in UN peacekeeping operations in 2004, Prince Zeid was appointed Advisor to the Secretary-General on Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. Prince Zeid’s report – endorsed by all states attending the September 2005 World Summit of the UN General Assembly – provided a detailed strategy to address sexual exploitation in UN peacekeeping missions.  Prince Zeid also served as chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Scope of Legal Protection under the Convention on the Safety of UN and Associated Personnel, and was also coordinator for the Non-Aligned Movement on peacekeeping. Prince Zeid is currently the chair of the Consultative Committee for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and a member of the Advisory Committee to the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation.

Peter Langille

Dr. H. Peter Langille is a SSHRCC research fellow, a co-director of research for the global initiative to develop a United Nations Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS) and director of 'Global Common Security i3'. Over the past decade, he has taught at the University of Western Ontario, where he specializes in peace and conflict studies, UN peace operations, global politics, Canadian defence and foreign policy.  Near the conclusion of the Cold-War, he initiated high-level discussions on revising NATO and Warsaw Pact military doctrine and deployments to a more defensive orientation. In the early nineties, his proposal and plans to convert CFB Cornwallis into a Canadian Multinational Peacekeeping Training Centre were solicited by numerous Governments and subsequently prompted the development of the Pearson Peacekeeping Training Centre. His 2002 book, Bridging the Commitment Capacity Gap: Existing Arrangements and Options for Enhancing UN Rapid Deployment, developed the concept, case, model and plans for a permanent UN Emergency Service. In 2003, it was adopted as the background book of the International Working Group for a UNEPS. His fourth book, Urgent (forthcoming) will elaborate on the diverse requirements of this service. Peter has worked with various levels of government and he remains active on the board of four civil-society organizations. Aside from research and teaching, he has six years of practical experience in the prevention, management and transformation of violent conflict.

Richard Goldstone

As a South African judge since 1980, Richard Goldstone helped to dismantle apartheid from within. In 1991 he was appointed chair of the Standing Commission of Inquiry Regarding Public Violence and Intimidation (the “Goldstone Commission”) which unearthed evidence of atrocities and was critical in defusing the widespread political violence of the time. From 1994 to 2003, he served as Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa that played a vital role in the country’s transition to democracy. From 1994 to 1996, Mr. Goldstone was the first Chief Prosecutor of the United Nations Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. He has also chaired the Independent Inquiry on Kosovo, and the committee that drafted the Valencia Declaration of Human Duties and Responsibilities.  In 2004 he was appointed by the UN Secretary-General to the Volcker Committee tasked with investigating the Iraq Oil for Food program, and has since proposed that a similar “oil for food” scheme be implemented in Sudan. He is the author of numerous articles on international criminal law and For Humanity: Reflections of a War Crimes Investigator (2000).

Joe Clark

In 1979 at age 39 the Right Honourable Joe Clark became the youngest person ever to hold the position of Prime Minister of Canada.  He first ran for office in the 1967 Alberta provincial election, and in 1972, won as a Conservative candidate in the federal election. He led the Conservative party from 1976 to 1983, and again from 1998 to 2003. As Secretary of State for External Affairs between 1984 and 1991, Mr. Clark strengthened Canada's position as an advocate for human rights and liberalized trade around the world. He spearheaded the efforts of Commonwealth foreign ministers to end apartheid in South Africa, and worked to secure the release of political prisoners from the Soviet Union. In 2006 he led the Carter Center Election Observation team in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and since 2004 he has led The Commonwealth Observer delegation to Cameroon in order to monitor the presidential elections. He resigned from the House of Commons in 2004, and then became the first Distinguished Statesman-in-Residence in the School of International Service and Senior Fellow in the Center for North American Studies at American University in Washington, D.C. He is currently a Professor of Practice for Public-Private Sector Partnerships at the McGill Centre for Developing-Area Studies.

Tony Comper

Tony Comper is the Immediate Past President and Chief Executive Officer of BMO Financial Group. He began his career at BMO in 1967 after obtaining a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Toronto.  Mr. Comper serves on the Board of Directors of Bank of Montreal, and is a Member of the Board of Directors of the International Monetary Conference. He is Vice-Chair of the C.D. Howe Institute and a Director of the C.D. Howe Memorial Foundation. He is Chair of the Corporate Advisory Board of The Learning Partnership, a Member of the Women in Capital Markets Advisory Council, and a Member of the North American Policy Committee of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives.  Mr. Comper served as Chair of the Campaign for the University of Toronto, is past Chairman of the University's Governing Council, former Vice-Chair of St. Michael's Hospital, and a Member of the University of New Brunswick’s Forging Our Futures Campaign. He is a Member of the International Business Leaders Advisory Council of the Mayor of Beijing and the Board of Governors of the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews.  In 1998, Mr. Comper received the Human Relations Award from the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews. In 2003, he received the Award of Merit from B’nai Brith Canada. In 2005, Mr. Comper and his wife Elizabeth founded FAST (Fighting Antisemitism Together), a national coalition of non-Jewish Canadian community and business leaders dedicated to speaking out against antisemitism.

Francis Deng

In May 2007, Francis Deng was appointed the UN Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide.  Dr. Deng holds an LLB from Khartoum University and an LLM and SJD from Yale Law School, and was the first person from the Southern Sudan to obtain a doctorate in any field.  He served in the Sudanese Foreign Service from 1972-1983 and was variously the Sudanese Ambassador to the United States, Canada, and Scandinavia and the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs during this time.   He also served as Acting Chairman of the Africa Leadership Forum from 1996-2000.  Dr. Deng was Representative of the Secretary-General on Internally Displaced Persons from 1992-2004, and received the Rome Prize for Peace and Humanitarian Action in 2000 for his work on internal displacement.  He holds an appointment as Research Professor of International Politics, Law and Society at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, where he is also the Director of the Center for Displacement Studies.  He has also held visiting professorships and teaching positions at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Affairs Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New York University, Yale Law School, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the United States Institute of Peace, the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, and the Brookings Institution, where he co-founded the Brookings Institution Project on Internal Displacement.  He has written, co-authored, and edited over thirty books in the fields of law, conflict resolution, internal displacement, human rights, anthropology, history and politics, and has written two novels on the crisis of identity in the Sudan. In 2005 he was the co-recipient of the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for "Ideas Improving World Order" and in 2007 received the Merage Foundation American Dream Leadership Award.

David Sheffer

From 1997 to 2001, during the second Clinton Administration, David Scheffer served as the first United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, participating in the creation of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the Extraordinary Chambers in Cambodia.  He was the chief U.S. negotiator in United Nations talks to establish the permanent International Criminal Court, and he headed the Atrocities Prevention Inter-Agency Working Group. During the first term of the Clinton Administration, Scheffer served as senior adviser and counsel to the U.S. Representative to the United Nations, Dr. Madeleine Albright, and also served on the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council from 1993-1996.  Scheffer received B.A.s from Harvard and Oxford University, and an LL.M. from Georgetown University Law Center.   He has previously been senior vice president of the United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA) and senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace.  He has taught at Georgetown University Law Center, George Washington University Law School, Duke University School of Law, Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, and is currently the Director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University.

Wenqi Zhu

Professor Wenqi Zhu is currently Professor of International Law at Renmin University of China, Beijing, and Director of its International Criminal Law Institute and its International Humanitarian Law Centre. Prof. Zhu was previously a diplomat in the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1988-1995, in part acting as Deputy Director of their International Law Branch. From 1995-2002 he held positions as a Legal Assistant, and Legal Advisor and Appeals Counsel in the Office of the Prosecutor, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. He holds an LLM and PhD in international law from the University of Paris, II. 

Dr. Razmik Panossian

Dr. Razmik Panossian is the Director of Policy, Programmes and Planning at Rights and Democracy (Montreal, Canada) where he manages the international programming of the institution. Prior to his move back to Canada in 2003, he taught courses on nationalism and ethnic conflict, post-Soviet transition/democratisation, and comparative politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Panossian obtained his BA from McGill (Montreal), MA from York (Toronto), and PhD from London School of Economics (with a thesis that won the Lord Bryce Prize for Best Dissertation in Comparative and International Politics in the UK). His new book, The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars, was published in 2006 by Columbia University Press/Hurst & Co. He has lectured and published extensively, including on the subjects of genocide, human rights and democratic development.

Dr. Gregory Stanton

Dr. Gregory Stanton is the James Farmer Professor of Human Rights at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and is President of Genocide Watch founder and Chair of the International Campaign to End Genocide and current President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Dr. Stanton has worked for human rights since the 1960's, when he was a voting rights worker in Mississippi. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Ivory Coast and as the Church World Service/CARE Field Director in Cambodia in 1980. He has degrees from Oberlin College, Harvard Divinity School, and Yale Law School, and a Doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Dr. Stanton has been a Law Professor at Washington and Lee and American Universities and the University of Swaziland. He was a legal advisor to the Ukrainian independence movement. He served in the State Department from 1992 to 1999, where he wrote the United Nations resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He founded the Cambodian Genocide Project in 1981, which is about to result in trials for the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge by a U.N./ Cambodian tribunal. In 1999, he founded Genocide Watch and the International Campaign to End Genocide. Dr. Stanton was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2001-2002, where he worked on his forthcoming book, The Eight Stages of Genocide: How Governments Can Tell When Genocide Is Coming and What They Can Do To Stop It.

Gay McDougall

Gay McDougall is the Executive Director of Global Rights, a human rights advocacy group partnering with local activists in in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Americas.  In 2005 Ms. McDougall was chosen as the first UN Independent Expert on Minority Issues.  Prior to this she served in various capacities with the UN: an elected independent expert on the treaty body overseeing the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1998, and a member (alternate) of the U.N. Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities of the Human Rights Commission in 1996.  Ms. McDougall was also awarded a prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 199 for her influencial work on international human rights.  During the 1980-90s, she was active in assisting the defence of political prisoners in South Africa and Nambia.  She founded the Commission of Independence for Namibia in 1989, a bipartisan group of distinguished Americans, to monitor the UN-mandated democratic transition.  Ms. McDougall earned her JD at Yale and an LL.M at London School of Economics.

Jerry Fowler

Jerry Fowler is an academic, lawyer and author on genocide.  He is the William E. Podlich Distinguished Visiting Professor at Claremont McKenna College and a visiting scholar at its Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights. Afterwards he will return as staff director of the Committee on Conscience at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  He also has served as legislative counsel for the Lawyers Committee on Human Rights and as special litigation counsel for the US Department of Justice. His works include “A New Chapter of Irony: The Legal Consequences of the Darfur Genocide Determination,” in Genocide Studies and Prevention (2006), and “The Church and Power: Responses to Genocide and Massive Human Rights Abuses in Comparative Perspective,” in Genocide in Rwanda: Complicity of the Churches? (2004).  He has taught at George Washington University Law School and George Mason University Law School, and received degrees from Stanford Law School and Princeton.

Roy Gutman

Roy Gutman is an internationally acclaimed American journalist and author. He received the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Bosnian genocide in 1993, where he provided the first documented reports of concentration camps. He is the director of the Crimes of War Project and Foreign Editor for the Washington Bureau of McClatchy Newspapers. Gutman was previously Newsday's European bureau chief, Reuters' Belgrade bureau chief and a State Department correspondent. He has been a Washington-based national security reporter for Newsday, and reported for Reuters from Bonn, Vienna, London, and Washington. His honours include the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, the George Polk Award for foreign reporting, the Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting, and a special Human Rights in Media Award from the International League for Human Rights. He holds an M.A. in international relations from the London School of Economics. Gutman is the author of Banana Diplomacy: The Making of American Policy in Nicaragua, 1981–1987 and A Witness to Genocide: The 1993 Pulitzer Prize Winning Dispatches on Ethnic Cleansing of Bosnia. He is co-author of Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know.

Carol Off

With extensive experience in both Canadian and international current affairs, Carol Off has covered conflicts in the Middle East, Haiti, the Balkans and the sub-continent, as well as events in the former Soviet Union, Europe, Asia, the United States and Canada. She reported the fallout from the 9/11 disasters with news features and documentaries from New York, Washington, London, Cairo and Afghanistan. She has covered Canadian military missions around the world including its latest combat operation in Kandahar.  Her many award-winning documentaries include: “Of Crimes and Courage”, the story of a child who survived the massacre of her family in Kosovo and then went on to personally hunt down the killers; “In the Company of War Lords”, the story of Washington’s complicity with Afghanistan’s most murderous criminals; "Playing with Fire," about the anti-Indian movement in North America; and “Flight from Bosnia”, an investigation into war criminals who found safe haven in Canada’s refugee system.  Carol Off's coverage of the post-war reconstruction of the Balkans and the war crimes trial for Yugoslavia led her to write the best-selling book, The Lion, the Fox and the Eagle: A Story of Generals and Justice in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and another national best-seller on the war in Croatia, The Ghosts of Medak Pocket: The Story of Canada’s Secret War, which won the prestigious Dafoe Foundation Award in 2005.  Carol Off began as an arts reporter and writer in the early 1980s, before becoming CBC Radio’s National Reporter for the Province of Quebec, where she covered among other stories the Bloc Quebecois, the Montreal massacre, the Oka crisis and several election campaigns.  She has won numerous awards for television and radio work, including: a Gemini; two gold medals from the New York Festival of Television; a selected screening at the Monte Carlo Television Festival; several awards and citations from the Columbia Television awards; a Gabriel award; a B’nai Brith Award and number of awards and citation from the National Radio and Television Association.   A graduate of the University of Western Ontari, and now lives and works in Toronto, where she hosts CBC Radio One's As it Happens. 

Mary Kimani

Mary Kimani worked as journalist at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda based in Arusha, Tanzania covering the Rwanda genocide trials. She later moved to Rwanda where she worked on a documentary project aimed at raising awareness and improving dialogue in post-conflict Rwanda, particularly between the survivors and perpetrators of the Rwanda genocide. Both projects were run by Internews, an international media service working in conflict regions. Mary has also covered the Burundi Peace process and the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo for Reuters and others, and has written articles for Time Magazine, El Mundo, and other publications. After six years with Internews she joined the not-for-profit Action Aid International overseeing communication programmes for Africa, before joining the UN where she works in the Africa Section of the Department of Information. She holds an MA in communication psychology. Her thesis examined the role of media, in particular Radio Television Libre Des Mille Collines, in inciting the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Her findings are published in The Media and the Rwanda Genocide, edited by Allan Thompson, Pluto Press, 2007.