Law School talk features Iranian Human Rights Watch executive

Zia-Zarifi

Human rights abuses within the context of the war on terror is the subject of a talk at Cornell Law School Wed-nesday, Feb. 25, by a Cornell alumnus from Iran who now works for Human Rights Watch (HRW). Saman Zia-Zarifi, deputy director of HRW's Asia division, will speak on "In the Trenches: Human Rights During the 'War on Terror,'" at 4 p.m. in G90 Myron Taylor Hall. His talk, which is free and open to the public, is the 2004 Cyrus Mehri Public Interest Lecture at the Law School.

Zia-Zarifi, who directed the academic freedom program at Human Rights Watch, has undertaken emergency missions investigating conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Before joining HRW, he was a senior research fellow in the Department of International Law at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He has written widely on the impact of multinational corporations and economic globalization on human rights, including Liability of Multinational Corporations for Violating International Law (co-edited with Menno Kamminga, Kluwer, 2000). He was born and raised in Tehran. He earned a bachelor of arts degree from Cornell in 1990, a J.D. from Cornell Law School in 1993 and an LL.M. in international law from New York University School of Law in 1997. He was a corporate litigator in Los Angeles for several years before his scholarly and HRW work.