International Advisory Board Members
Richard J. Goldstone, Chair, Justice of the Constitutional Court, South Africa
Richard J. Goldstone is widely regarded by the international community as one of the leading advocates for justice and human rights in the world today. Judge Goldstone was the Chief Prosecutor of the United Nations Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. From 1991 to 1994, he chaired what became known as the Goldstone Commission, an independent judicial commission that investigated activities and people who posed a threat to the restoration of civil rights during the transition to post-apartheid South Africa. During his career, he has addressed problems of fidelity to law in unjust regimes and worked to define judicial ethics for international judges. He was educated at King Edward VII School and the University of the Witwatersrand, where he graduated in 1962. From August 1999 to December 2001, he was the chairperson of the International Independent Inquiry on Kosovo. He is the chairman emeritus of the Human Rights Institute of the International Bar Association, and he was also a member of the Independent Inquiry Committee into the U.N. Oil for Food Programme (the Volcker Committee). He chaired a United Nations Committee to advise on the archives of the Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Since 2002, he has been a faculty director of the Brandeis Institute for International Judges. He has served as a visiting professor at Harvard, Georgetown, Fordham, Stanford and New York University. He is presently a Senior Fellow at Yale's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. In 2008, he was named the recipient of the MacArthur Award for International Justice and as the first “The Hague Peace Philosopher.” In April 2009, he was named to head a fact-finding mission investigating alleged war crimes during the conflict in Gaza from December 2008 to January 2009.
Diego Arria, former Permanent Representative of Venezuela to the United Nations, Venezuela
Diego Arria is a distinguished diplomat and businessman who served as the Permanent Representative of Venezuela to the United Nations and as President of the Security Council. Recently he was Special Adviser to the Secretary General of the United Nations and Visiting Scholar at Columbia University. He previously served as Governor of Caracas, Congressman and Minister of Information and Tourism of Venezuela, Visiting Diplomatic Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and Board member of the International Peace Academy in New York. Arria serves on the advisory boards of Unilever, the Latin American Advisor of the Inter-American Dialogue, the Institute of the Americas at the University of California in San Diego, School of International Service (SIS) at American University, Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University, and the International Crisis Group. He also serves on the Board of Governors of the Museum of Arts and Design of New York and the United Nations Association of the United States (UN-USA). Arria is Chairman of the Advisory Board of Athelera LLC in New York, a strategic financial advisory firm focused on mergers and acquisitions.
Thomas Buergenthal, Judge of the International Court of Justice, Washington D.C.
A United States citizen, Thomas Buergenthal was a judge on the 15-member International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague from 2000 until his resignation in September 2010. He is a former President of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and a former member of the UN Human Rights Committee. Recipient of the Gruber Foundation International Justice Prize and member of the Ethics Commission of the International Olympic Committee, he has been re-appointed Lobingier Professor of Comparative Law and Jurisprudence at the George Washington University Law School, where he taught before his election to the ICJ. Judge Buergenthal is author or co-author of numerous books and law review articles on international law and international human rights topics. His memoir A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy was published in 2009.
James Carroll, author, Massachusetts
James Carroll is a novelist and a journalist whose writings on politics, religion, and culture have challenged thinkers and government leaders in America and elsewhere. He has studied poetry and religion, and he has worked as a civil rights activist and a professor. In 1969, he became Catholic chaplain at Boston University, but left the priesthood in 1974 to write full time. Carroll has published ten novels, including The City Below (1996), a New York Times Notable Book, and numerous award-winning works of nonfiction, including An American Requiem: God, My Father and the War that Came Between Us (1996), which won the National Book Award in 1996. His weekly column in the Boston Globe reminds readers of the moral imperatives that govern all people in a pluralistic society. His book Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History was released in January 2001, followed by Toward a New Catholic Church in 2002. His tenth novel, Secret Father, was published in 2005. In 2006, he published House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, which won the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award. The documentary film James Carroll's Constantine's Sword, based on his book, was released in theaters in April 2008 and is available on DVD. Practicing Catholic, in which he examines why he is still a practicing member of the religion, was published in April 2009. Carroll taught an undergraduate course at Brandeis in Spring 2009 called "Sacred Violence: An Investigation in History and Theology," which explored the relationship between religion and violence, with special focus on Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. He is currently Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University in Boston. Carroll's latest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World, was published in March, 2011.
Hans Corell, former Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs and Legal Counsel of the United Nations, Sweden
Hans Corell served as Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs and the Legal Counsel of the United Nations from March 1994 to March 2004. In this capacity, he was head of the Office of Legal Affairs in the United Nations Secretariat. Before joining the United Nations, he was Ambassador and Under-Secretary for Legal and Consular Affairs in his native Sweden’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1984 to 1994. From 1962 to 1972, he served first as a law clerk and later as a judge in circuit courts and appeal courts. In 1972, he joined the Ministry of Justice, where he became a Director in 1979 and the Chief Legal Officer in 1981. Corell has been a member of Sweden's delegation to the UN General Assembly 1985-1993 and has had several assignments related to the Council of Europe, OECD, and the CSCE (now OSCE). He was co-author of the CSCE proposal for the establishment of the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which was transmitted to the UN in February 1993. In 1998, he was the Secretary-General's representative at the Rome Conference on the International Criminal Court. Since his retirement from public service in 2004, Corell is engaged in many different activities in the legal field, inter alia as legal adviser, lecturer, and member of different boards. Among other activities, he is involved in the work of the International Bar Association and the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law. In January 2006, he gave the keynote address at the fourth Brandeis Institute for International Judges, held in Dakar, Senegal. Since February 2006, he has been Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the University of Lund. He is the author of many publications. His website is at http://www.havc.se. (Click here to read an interview with Hans Corell conducted on March 9, 2006.)
Nancy Kassebaum Baker, former United States Senator, Kansas
Nancy Landon Kassebaum was first elected to the United States Senate in 1978 and reelected in 1984 and 1990. During those 18 years, she served on the Commerce Committee (chair of Aviation Subcommittee), the Budget Committee, the Foreign Relations Committee (chair of the African Subcommittee), and served as the chairman of the Labor and Human Resources Committee of the 104th Congress, now called the HELP Committee. In 1996, she married Howard Baker (U.S. senator from Tennessee, 1966-1985). After retiring from the Senate, Senator Kassebaum Baker served on the Board of Trustees for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Kaiser Family Foundation. She was the chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Rural Health to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the chairman of the George C. Marshall Foundation and the American-Turkish Council. She served on the 16-member Commission for Africa created in 2004 and chaired by Prime Minister Tony Blair. She currently serves on the International Advisory Board of the U.S./Middle East Project. She is the co-chair of Vital Voices Global Partnership.
Kishore Mahbubani, ambassador and scholar, Singapore
Kishore Mahbubani was appointed the first Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in August 2004. Currently, he is the Dean and Professor in the Practice of Public Policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKY SPP) of the National University of Singapore. He was formerly a civil servant and career diplomat who was with the Singapore Foreign Service from 1971-2004. His overseas postings included Cambodia (during the war, in 1973-74), Kuala Lumpur, the United States, and the United Nations. Most recently, he was the Permanent Representative of Singapore to the United Nations and High Commissioner of Singapore to Canada. Mahbubani served as President of the Security Council in January 2001 and May 2002 and was the Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Ministry from 1993-1998 and he also served twice as Singapore’s Ambassador to the UN. He was the first Dean of the Civil Service College in Singapore and has served on the Boards of several institutes in Singapore. Prof. Mahbubani has published and spoken in all corners of the globe and is the author of Can Asians Think? and of Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust between America and the World. His latest book, titled The New Asian Hemisphere: the irresistible shift of global power to the East, was published in New York in February 2008. The Foreign Policy Association Medal was awarded to him in New York in June 2004 with the following opening words in the citation: “A gifted diplomat, a student of history and philosophy, a provocative writer and an intuitive thinker.” He was also listed as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines in September 2005.
Jamie Metzl, Executive Vice President, Asia Society, New York, NY
Jamie F. Metzl is Executive Vice President of Asia Society and heads the Asia 21 Initiative. He is responsible for overseeing the Asia Society’s strategic direction and overall program activities globally. Dr. Metzl has extensive government experience including service in the White House, the Department of State and the U.S. Senate. In 2004, he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House of Representatives from Missouri's Fifth Congressional District in Kansas City. Dr. Metzl's government appointments have included Deputy Staff Director and Senior Counselor of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senior Coordinator for International Public Information at the Department of State, and Director for Multilateral and Humanitarian Affairs on the White House National Security Council during the Clinton Administration. At the White House, he coordinated U.S. government international public information campaigns for Iraq, Kosovo, and other crises. A Khmer speaker, he was a Human Rights Officer for the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) from 1991 to 1993, where he helped establish a nation-wide human rights investigation and monitoring unit for Cambodia. The author of a non-fiction book on human rights in Southeast Asia and the novel The Depths of the Sea (St. Martin's Press), his writing on Asian affairs, virtual reality, human genetic engineering and other topics has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs and many other publications and he is a regular commentator in national and international media including the BBC, CNN, and Fox News. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a founder and Board Co-Chair of the bipartisan national security organization Partnership for a Secure America, and a former White House Fellow and Aspen Institute Crown Fellow. He serves on numerous charitable boards and holds a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian history from Oxford University, a juris doctorate from Harvard Law School, and is a magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University. Dr. Metzl has completed seven ironman triathlons and 25 marathons.
Sari Nusseibeh, President, Al-Quds University, Palestine
Sari Nusseibeh is a scholar and humanitarian whose voice has resonated throughout the Middle East with the hope for a solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. In his various roles as president of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, and as an activist, he has worked zealously on behalf of the people of his region. A philosophy professor, Nusseibeh earned his B.A. in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford University in 1971 and his Ph.D. in Islamic Philosophy from Harvard University in 1978. In October 2001, Nusseibeh was briefly appointed Palestinian political representative in Jerusalem. In 2004-5, he was a Rita Hauser Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. He was invited to deliver the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Harvard in 2008, and the Multatuli Lecture at Leuven University in 2009, where he was also awarded an honorary doctoral degree. His other awards include the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Four Freedoms Medal, 2004. He is a prolific writer whose work appears regularly in magazines and newspapers in the United States, Europe, Japan, and the Middle East. His English-language books, including No Trumpets, No Drums: A Two-State Settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (1991), have been translated into several languages, as has his more recent work Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (2007), co-authored with Anthony David. His newest book, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? will be published in February of 2011.
Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary General for Somalia
Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah has devoted himself to African development and conflict management throughout his professional career. Between 1969 and 1984, Ould-Abdallah held several posts with the Mauritanian government, including minister of foreign affairs, ambassador to the United States, and ambassador to the European Union. In 1984 he began work within the United Nations as the special coordinator for Africa and the least developed countries, and subsequently (1993-1995) as the special representative of the secretary-general in Burundi. He has authored many publications, including La Diplomatie Pytomane (1996) and Burundi on the Brink (2000), a detailed account of his experiences with the United Nations from 1993 to 1995. Ould-Abdallah was previously the executive secretary for the Global Coalition for Africa, an intergovernmental forum dedicated to addressing and promoting Africa's political and economic reforms. He currently holds the title of USG, Special Representative of the Secretary General for Somalia. He previously held the same title for West Africa. In January 2006, he gave the keynote address at the West African Judicial Colloquium in Dakar, Senegal, a gathering coordinated by the Center of twelve West African high court judges and four international judges.
Michael Ratner '66, President, Center for Constitutional Rights, New York, NY
Michael Ratner is President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin. Both are non-profit human rights litigation organizations. He was part of the small group of lawyers that first took on representation of the Guantánamo detainees in January 2001, a case that resulted in a victory in the Supreme Court in 2004. CCR established a network of over 600 pro bono lawyers to represent Guantánamo detainees and will keep working until Guantánamo is closed. He and CCR have also attempted to break the wall of impunity around those officials in the US who ran the torture program. They have filed criminal complaints in the courts of Germany, France and Spain against former US officials including former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. A major area of Ratner's litigation and writing is the enforcement of the prohibition on torture and murder against various dictators and generals who travel to the United States. He has sued on behalf of victims in Guatemala, East Timor, Haiti and Argentina, among other countries. Recently he has been involved in the representation of Wikileaks. Ratner’s books include Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in 21st-Century America (2011); International Human Rights Litigation in U.S. Courts, Second Edition (2008), Against War with Iraq (2003), Guantánamo: What the World Should Know (2004), and The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book (2008). He has taught human rights litigation at Yale and Columbia Law Schools. A past president of the National Lawyers Guild, Ratner has received many awards, among them Trial Lawyer of the Year, the Columbia Law School Public Interest Law Foundation Award, the Columbia Law School Medal of Honor (2005), the North Star Community Frederick Douglass Award, Honorary Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School (2005), and The Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Prize for Creative Citizenship (2007). In 2006, the National Law Journal named Ratner as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the United States.
Shiranee Tilakawardane
, Supreme Court Justice, Sri Lanka
Shiranee Tilakawardane is a Supreme Court judge in Sri Lanka. She was the first woman appointed as a Court of Appeal judge in her country. Previously, she was a high court judge and an admiralty court judge. Tilakawardane's efforts are focused on the fields of equality, gender education, and child rights. She received an award from a national child protection authority for her work for the abused children in Sri Lanka. She has been active in Sakshi of India's gender workshops for judges, the Asia Pacific Forum for Gender Education for Judges, and serves on the International Panel of Judges for the Child Rights Bureau. Tilakawardane served as chairperson of a presidential commission investigating corruption in the purchase of arms and services by the Sri Lankan armed forces. From 2001 to 2003, she was one of ten Brandeis International Fellows who participated in a series of three one-week institutes over an 18-month period, exploring topics such as human rights, intervention, and international law. (Click here to read an interview with Judge Tilakawardane conducted on March 9, 2006.)
Norbert Weissberg, Chairman, Package Research Laboratory LLC and Stapling Machines Company LLC, New York
Since 1996, Norbert Weissberg has served as chairman and controlling shareholder of Package Research Laboratory, the nation’s largest licensee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture for inspection of wooden pallets and containers intended for export. During that time, he has also held the position of chairman and controlling shareholder at Stapling Machines Company, a manufacturer of machine tools. From 1998 to 2002, he was chairman of the Israel division of the Coca Cola Bottling Company, and for 12 years prior was president of Ascom Holding Inc., a holding company for seven operating companies owned by Swiss investors. From 1962 to 1965, he was president of Equilease Corporation, a national equipment leasing company that was later purchased by leading aerospace manufacturer Allied-Signal Corporation. In addition to the Ethics Center International Advisory Board, he is on the boards of the Medical Development for Israel, the American Jewish Historical Society, the Concert Artists Guild, and the “New Group” Theater.
Theodore C. Sorensen, Founding Chair (1928-2010), Distinguished Lawyer, Author, John F. Kennedy Advisor and Speechwriter