2007-2008 DHRC Events Calendar

Unless noted, all events are free and open to the public.
For parking information, please consult the campus map at map.duke.edu

2008 May 03

Conference on Torture

8:30-5:00 - Franklin 240; John Hope Franklin Building, Duke University, 2204 Erwin Rd.

See the conference poster, announcement, and agenda.

2008 Apr 12

"Moral Mathematics: The Science of Human Rights", a conference

8:30 am - 5:00 pm - Old Chemistry Building, Room 116, West Campus

See the conference poster, agenda, and participants.

2008 Apr 11

Shirin Ebadi and "Moral Mathematics: The Science of Human Rights," a conference

5:30 -7:00 pm - Richard White Auditorium, East Campus

See the conference poster, agenda, and participants.

2008 Mar 19

Cristine Bader, "Business & Human Rights: Perspectives from BP and the United Nations"

Time and Location: TBA

2008 Jan 30

Liz Sevčenko, Sites of Conscience: "Activating Historic Sites for Human Rights"

12 noon-1:30 pm - Franklin 240, John Hope Franklin Center

2008 Jan 28

Veronica Cruz Sanchez: "Gender, Rape, & Abortion: Working for Reproductive Rights and Dignity for Women in Mexico"

6:00-7:30pm - Duke's East Campus, White Lecture Hall

2007 Oct 31

Faye Schulman - A Holocaust resistor who fought with Polish partisan units will discuss the reasons she became a resistor and her memories of the Holocaust.

7:30 pm - Richard White Auditorium, East Campus

2007 Oct 31

Patricia de Valdez and "Memoria Abierta" - Remembering Argentina's dirty war

John Hope Franklin Center 240 - 12:00-1:30 pm - Lunch is provided - Free and open to the public

2007 Oct 29

Day of the Dead - Publicizing the new Duke human rights archives

Duke Library

2007 Oct 24

Lt. Col. Stuart Couch - The military prosecutor who refused to bring charges against Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Guantanamo Bay prisoner linked to 9/11, because he thought the evidence was tainted by torture will speak about his personal experiences and the reason behind his courageous decision.

7:30-9:00pm - Sanford 04

2007 Oct 17

John Amaechi - the first openly gay player in the National Basketball Association speaks on gay and lesbian rights in sports and America

7:30 pm - Page Auditorium

2007 Sep 26

"Unheard Voices in the War on Terror" - A half-day conference featuring Stephen Grey

Noon-5:30 pm - John Hope Franklin Center 240 - Lunch is provided

2007 Sep 23

"Nuremberg: The Nazis Facing Their Crimes" - Narrated by Christopher Plummer, this gripping documentary presents archival footage of the Nuremberg Trials shot under the direction of the legendary John Ford. American film crews captured every moment of the trial at Nuremberg.

8:00 pm - Richard White Auditorium, East Campus

Archives

To see prior DHRC events calendars click here

Narrated by Christopher Plummer, this gripping documentary presents archival footage of the Nuremberg Trials shot under the direction of the legendary John Ford. American film crews captured every moment of the trial at Nuremberg. Sixty years later, this footage has been digitally remastered and edited to reveal never before seen material. The 90-minute film will be followed by a Q&A with director Christian Delage.

Sponsored by the Center for French and Francophone Studies. Cosponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center.

8:00 pm - Richard White Auditorium, East Campus
Street parking is available - Free and open to the public

The Duke Human Rights Center presents a half-day conference featuring Stephen Grey, the author of Ghost Plane, an expose of the extraordinary rendition program that won the Overseas Press Club of America's top award for best international reporting in any medium dealing with human rights. Based in London, Grey uncovered how the CIA used a secret fleet of aircraft, including from North Carolina's Johnston County field, to transport individuals suspected of plotting against the United States to secret prisons in countries where they were tortured. Grey, a former head of Investigations at the Sunday Times of London, won the 2005 Amnesty International award for best magazine report on human rights.

Two panels follow Grey's talk. The first features Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen detained by the United States in 2002 and rendered to Syria. There, Arar was tortured. Since, Arar has successfully sued the Canadian government and he is currently suing the US government. Since Arar cannot enter the United States, he will be on live video hook up from the University of Ottawa. Arar will be joined by Grey; Steven Watt, a Senior Staff Attorney with the Human Rights Program of the ACLU; and Christina Cowger, a leader in North Carolina Stop Torture Now.

A second panel presents Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak, a new book featuring the poetry of Guantanamo detainees, with a forward by Ariel Dorfman, who will join us. Some of the poetry will be read by Duke students.

The talk and panels will be live streamed on the Web and at the Bryan Center and the University of Ottawa, where a live audience will also take part in the discussion.

Sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center. Cosponsored by the Duke Islamic Studies Center, the Duke University Center for International Studies, the Franklin Humanities Institute, the Department of Religion, the Law School's Guantanamo Defense Clinic, the ACLU of North Carolina, the Duke student chapter of the ACLU and the Duke Human Rights Coalition.

The Regulator Bookshop will be selling Ghost Plane and Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak from 1-3 pm at the Franklin Center

Noon-5:30 pm
John Hope Franklin Center 240
Lunch is provided
Parking is free with a voucher (in the medical center lot).

Free and open to the public

John Amaechi, the first openly gay player in the National Basketball Association, will speak about his experiences and gay and lesbian rights in sports and America. As a collegian, Amaechi played for Penn State, where he was a two-time First Team Academic All-American. During his professional career, he played for the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Orlando Magic, the Chicago Bulls and the Utah Jazz.

Sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center. Co-sponsored by the Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Life at Duke and the Duke University Union.

Page Auditorium - 7:30 pm - Free and open to the public

Couch was a military prosecutor who refused to bring charges against Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Guantanamo Bay prisoner linked to 9/11, because he thought the evidence was tainted by torture. For Lt. Col. Couch, the Slahi case represented a wrenching personal challenge: a collision between the government's objectives and his moral compass. Couch will be speaking about his personal experiences and the reason behind his courageous decision. Raised in Asheboro, NC, Couch graduated from Duke in 1987 and received his law degree from Campbell University in 1996.

Sponsored by the Humanitarian Challenges Focus program. Cosponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center

7:30-9:00pm - Sanford 04
Free and open to the public

In an effort to publicize the new human rights archives, the Duke Human Rights Center is sponsoring a series of events with the Archive for Human Rights of Perkins Library, including a speaker and a display of altars tied to the Mexican "Day of the Dead" celebration on November 1 and 2.

Students enrolled in several Duke classes will construct altars in the Library drawing on our growing human rights collection. By curating their own exhibit in the form of a traditional Latin American Dia De Los Muertos altar, students will have the chance to ruminate on the relationships between memory, history, community, social action and power. So far, the classes participating at "Human Rights in the Americas," which will be using the Marshall Meyer collection; and "Humanitarian Focus," which will be using the International Monitoring Institute archives. Also, local children from a Duke-Durham Partnership school will be studying the "Day of the Dead" as part of their curriculum and will be constructing a children's altar at Duke.

Hosted by the Archive for Human Rights and the Duke Human Rights Center. Cosponsored by the Carolina and Duke Consortium for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Faye Schulman is one of those rare individuals who is not a Holocaust survivor, but a Holocaust resistor. From the day the German armies occupied her home village in Eastern Poland, Faye fought with partisan units. To fight as a Jew among Polish partisans without being killed was in itself an accomplishment. But to be a Jewish woman doing this was exceptional. Besides boasting about her (non-existent) nursing skills, Faye won her comrades' respect because she quickly became a crack shot and skilled horsewoman. Perhaps even more extraordinary is Faye's photographic ability. In every town the partisans raided, Faye stole film, developer and paper. As a result, 4,000 of her photos form the core of the museum on World War II in Minsk. Faye will be discussing the reasons she became a resistor and her memories of the Holocaust.

Sponsored by the Humanitarian Challenges Focus program. Cosponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center, Jewish Studies, the Freeman Center for Jewish Life and the History Department.

7:30 pm - Richard White Auditorium, East Campus
Street parking is available - Free and open to the public

Patricia de Valdez is the director of the Argentina-based "Memoria Abierta," a physical and digital memorial to the dirty war. She will be talking about her work as part of the Wednesday at the Center series. "Memoria Abierta," or Open Memory, is a ground-breaking effort to not only collect and display objects from Argentina's period of state terrorism, but also to use memory-gathering activities as a way to strengthen a social conscience that values active memory and influences Argentine political culture and the construction of identity and the strengthening of democracy. "Memoria Abierta" is a founding member of the "Sites of Conscience" association of museums, which include New York's Lower East Side Tenement Museum and Cape Town's District Six Museum.

Hosted by the Archive for Human Rights and the Duke Human Rights Center. Cosponsored by the Franklin Humanities Institute and the Carolina and Duke Consortium for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

John Hope Franklin Center 240 - 12:00-1:30 pm - Lunch is provided - Parking is free with a voucher (in the medical center lot). - Free and open to the public

Veronica Cruz Sanchez is the founder and head of Las Libres, the only organization to tackle the issue of access to abortion after rape in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, where unsafe abortion is one of the highest causes of death among women of reproductive age. In Guanajuato, abortion has been legal in cases of rape for over thirty years. However, due to official negligence, obstruction, and a wealth of administrative hurdles, few if any rape victims in Guanajuato have ever obtained a state-provided abortion. Veronica leads the fight against this injustice by connecting rape victims with medical and legal aid, training youth to hold health workshops for peers, and challenging policy makers to ensure real access to abortion as allowed under the law.

Sponsored by the Duke in Madrid Program; UNC School of Law; IPAS; Duke Program in Women's Studies; the UNC-Duke Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies; Duke Center for Human Rights; Baldwin Scholars; Duke Women's Center; Duke Department of Romance Studies; Duke Program in Latino/a Studies; Duke Department of History; Duke Spanish Service Learning; UNC Institute for the Study of the Americas; Duke Institute for Critical U.S. Studies

6:00-7:30 - Duke's East Campus, White Lecture Hall - Free and open to the public - Street parking available

For more information about this event, please contact Caroline Light or Tamera Marko.

Liz Sevčenko is founding Director of the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, a network of historic sites that foster public dialogue on pressing contemporary issues. She works with over 1300 initiatives in more than 90 countries to design programs and practices that reflect on past struggles and inspire citizens to become involved in addressing their contemporary legacies. Before launching the Coalition, she had over ten years of experience developing public history projects designed to catalyze civic dialogue in New York and around the country. Her project "Mapping Memories," in which visitors were invited to contribute their memories to a changing map of New York City and discuss conflicting claims to urban space, was produced at the Museum of the City of New York, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Eldridge Street Project, and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, as well as at community centers and street fairs. As Vice President for Programs at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, she developed exhibits and educational activities that connect the dramatic stories of the neighborhood's immigrants past and present. She has most recently published "The Making of Loisaida" in Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York City.

Sponsored by the Program on History, Public Policy & Social Change and the Charles S. Murphy Fund. Cosponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center and the Archive for Human Rights of Perkins Library.

12 noon-1:30 pm - Franklin 240, John Hope Franklin Center - Lunch provided - Parking is free with a voucher in the Medical Center lots - Free and open to the public

The Kenan Institute for Ethics is pleased to host a lecture by Christine Bader, an executive at BP and Advisor to the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Business and Human Rights. Bader will share her experiences with the UN and with making human rights central to BP's work across the globe.

Bader is currently on loan from BP to the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for business and human rights, who is charged with creating an overarching framework for practice in these areas, including the clarification of standards of corporate responsibility and the role of governments. Bader received her M.B.A. from Yale University.

From 2000 to 2003, she lived and worked for BP in Indonesia and China, focusing on the social impacts of two of the company's biggest projects: the Tangguh LNG project in West Papua and the Shanghai Ethylene Cracker Company, a BP-Sinopec joint venture. She then moved to BP headquarters in London, where she led the development of the company's Human Rights Guidance Note (available at bp.com/humanrights).

This event is co-sponsored by the Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership & Ethics (COLE) and the Duke Human Rights Center.

There will be a lunch buffet following the talk. While the talk is open to all, seating at the lunch is limited. Please RSVP to Ada Gregory at ada.gregory@duke.edu if you'd like to join Ms. Bader for lunch.

Keynote speaker Shirin Ebadi is the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace prize. An Iranian, Ebadi is the first woman to be named to the bench in her country. After serving as president of the Tehran city court from 1975 to 1979, Ebadi was forced to resign after the Islamic republic decided that women were not suitable for such posts.

Ebadi then established a law practice and took on the kind of politically sensitive cases many lawyers refused, including alleged human rights violations by the Iranian authorities. Her memoir, Iran Awakening: One Woman's Journey to Reclaim Her Life and Country, was hailed by South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu as "the riveting story of an amazing and very brave woman living through some quite turbulent times. And she emerges with head unbowed." Ebadi also works for women's rights and greater legal protection for Iranian children. A professor at Tehran University, she lives in Iran.

There will be a book signing of Iran Awakening: One Woman's Journey to Reclaim Her Life and Country from 7:00 to 7:30 pm, hosted by the Regulator Bookshop

See the conference poster, agenda, and participants.

Sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center and RTI International. Co-sponsored by the Karl von der Heyden endowment, the Trent Foundation, Duke Libraries, the Duke Center for International Studies, the Duke Islamic Studies Center, the Kenan Institute for Ethics and Women's Studies and the Duke Chapter of Amnesty International.

5:30 - 7:00 pm - Richard White Auditorium, East Campus - Street parking available - Free and open to the public

"Moral Mathematics: The Science of Modern Human Rights" is a one-day conference that examines how the quantitative sciences, including statistics, economics, and demography, as well as certain kinds of sociology and political science, can contribute to human rights improvement around the world. Recent contributions of this kind include (1) measuring progress in healthcare, gender equality, education, and the exercise of political and economic rights; (2) estimation of civilian casualties and patterns of abuse for use in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions or as evidence for prosecution in the International Criminal Court; (3) the development of sustainable economic growth plans and debt relief packages tied to specific and measurable improvement in national rights status; (4) the use of strong cryptography to ensure confidentiality of informant data; (5) determination of factors that predispose nations to human rights abuse or which encourage change.

Speakers include Patrick Ball, Benentech, "Unexpected data, or, the peril of 'common sense' about political violence: Lessons from Colombia"; Lara Wolfson-World Health Organization (Switzerland), "Survey methodology for unsettled populations"; Beth Osborne Deponte, Yale University: "Iraq civilian casualty estimates using the Lancet methodology"; and Diane Nelson, Duke, "Who Counts? Reckoning The After/Math of War in Guatemala."

See the conference poster, agenda, and participants.

Sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center and RTI International. Co-sponsored by the Karl von der Heyden endowment, the Trent Foundation, the Duke Center for International Studies, and the Kenan Institute for Ethics.

8:30 am - 5:00 pm - Old Chemistry Building, Room 116 - West Campus - The conference is free and open to the public - Duke Map

See the conference poster, announcement, and agenda.

Sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center and North Carolina Stop Torture Now

8:30-5:00 - Franklin 240 - John Hope Franklin Building, Duke University - 2204 Erwin Rd. - Parking free with a medical center voucher - Lunch provided - Free and open to the public