INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS PROGRAM
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO FACULTY OF LAW
Presents
Payam Akhavan
“Building Democracy in Iran: Towards a New Middle-East”
Tuesday February 2
12:30-2:00 pm
Solarium
A light lunch will be served.
Professor Akhavan is Professor of International Law at McGill University. He was formerly Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of Toronto Faculty of Law, Senior Fellow at Yale Law School, and earned his doctorate at Harvard Law School. He was the first Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor's Office of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda at The Hague and played a key role in the development of its foundational jurisprudence. He is also Co-Founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, an investigative commission-in-exile that promotes accountability for atrocities committed by the current Iranian leadership.
Payam is counsel to Georgia before the International Court of Justice in proceedings against the Russian Federation for "ethnic cleansing" arising from the 2008 Russian invasion of South Ossetia and has also appeared in leading cases before several other international courts and tribunals. He has published extensively including "Beyond Impunity: Can International Criminal Justice Prevent Future Atrocities?" which was selected by the International Library of Law and Legal Theory as one of "the most significant published journal essays in contemporary legal studies." He is also the author of the Report on the Work of the Office of the Special Advisor of the United Nations Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide (2005). His work has been featured internationally including in the New York Times and BBC. In recognition of his contributions to human rights, Payam was selected by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader in 2005. For more information on his pro-democracy activities in Iran, see Maclean's magazine, “Helping the revolution: How a McGill prof helped teach Iran's opposition about non-violent protest”
http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/09/17/helping-the-revolution/
Please RSVP by contacting Kara Norrington at ihrp.events@gmail.com.
