University of Iowa News Release

Feb. 26, 2010

United Nations human rights expert to speak at UI on March 4

United Nations human rights expert Manfred Nowak will speak about torture and its use in the fight against terrorism at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 4, at Shambaugh Auditorium in the University of Iowa Main Library.

Nowak's appearance at the UI is being presented by the UI Lecture Committee in conjunction with the Journal of Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems, a journal of the College of Law. The journal is hosting Nowak for its Friday, March 5 Symposium on Human Rights and U.S. Standing in the World Under the Obama Administration at the UI College of Law. Both events are free and open to the public.

Nowak has been a U.N. expert on legal questions on enforced disappearances since 2002 and was appointed as U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in 2004.

He has published more than 400 books and articles on international, constitutional, administrative and human rights law, including the standard commentary on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. He was awarded the UNESCO Prize for the Teaching of Human Rights in 1994 and the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Human Rights in 2007. In 1992 Nowak co-founded the Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights at the University of Vienna, where he currently serves as co-director.

As U.N. expert on missing persons in the former Yugoslavia, he started a process aimed at the identification of missing persons through exhumation of mortal remains between 1994 and 1997. From 1996-2003, Nowak was a judge at the Human Rights Chamber in Bosnia.

For more information, see http://lectures.uiowa.edu/details.php?ID=648  and http://www.uiowa.edu/~tlcp/.

STORY SOURCE: University of Iowa News Services, 300 Plaza Centre One, Iowa City, Iowa 52242-2500