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Posted 9-5-01
CLEVELAND -- One of the nation's foremost authorities on international human rights will deliver the inaugural lecture of the Klatsky Seminar in Human Rights at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
Harold Hongju Koh, the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale University, and former assistant secretary of state for human rights, democracy, and labor, will speak on "A Human Rights Strategy for the Era of Globalization." The lecture will begin at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, September 13 in room A59 of the law school. The speech is being presented in collaboration with the law school's Frederick K. Cox International Law Center.
A graduate of Harvard, Oxford, and Harvard Law School, Koh has been on the faculty of the Yale Law School since 1985. He has authored or edited more than 70 articles and several books, including Deliberative Democracy and Human Rights, Transnational Legal Problems, and The National Security Constitution: Sharing Power after the Iran-Contra Affair. The Iran-Contra book won the American Political Science Association's Richard Neustadt Award as the best book on the American presidency published in 1990.
Koh has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Century Foundation, and has been a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is an overseer of Harvard University and a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law and the American Law Institute. He has won numerous awards for his human rights work, which includes the representation of Haitian and Cuban refugees before the U.S. Supreme Court. He served in the State Department from 1998-2001.
"This lecture will energize our community of learning and enable us to continue to fulfill our mission of preparing leaders in the practice of law, public and community service, and commerce," said Gerald Korngold, dean and the McCurdy Professor of Law at CWRU.
"We are delighted to be able to bring Professor Koh to inaugurate the Klatsky Seminar," added Hiram Chodosh, professor and director of the Cox Center. "His complete mastery of international human rights law and his experience as the leading human rights advisor to the president makes Koh uniquely authoritative on the advancement of human rights around the globe."
The Klatsky Seminar in Human Rights was established in 2000 to provide a forum to highlight issues affecting human rights. It was made possible by a gift from Bruce J. Klatsky, chairman and chief executive officer of Phillips-Van Heusen Corporation, and a 1970 graduate of Adelbert College (now part of CWRU.) He served as a member of the University's Board of Trustees from 1995-2001. He is also a board member of Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization dedicated to the protection of human rights worldwide.
This inaugural session of the Klatsky Seminar also helps mark the 10th anniversary of the Cox Center's founding, and to initiate a year-long symposium entitled "International Crimes Against Women," which will be published in the Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law in the spring of 2002.