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Events
Kevin Boyle and the Rise of the Human Rights Movement
Event
Are You With Me? Kevin Boyle and the Rise of the Human Rights Movement
Please join us for the launch of Are You With Me? Kevin Boyle and the Rise of the Human Rights Movement.
This book tells the remarkable story of the late Professor Kevin Boyle, one of the world's great human rights lawyers. Practitioner, activist, law teacher, and long-time director of the University of Essex Human Rights Centre. Kevin devoted his life to fighting for justice, first in Northern Ireland and then on the international stage, in the process earning a place in the pantheon of human rights champions.
Author Mike Chinoy will be speaking at the launch, accompanied by friends and colleagues of Kevin Boyle.
Speakers
Mike Chinoy
As a foreign correspondent for CNN for 24 years, Mike Chinoy won Emmy, Peabody and Dupont awards for his journalism. While he worked primarily in China and North Korea, he also reported on the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 80s. It was during this time that he met Kevin Boyle. Chinoy is currently a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the University of Southern California’s US-China Institute and is based in Hong Kong. In addition to Are You WIth Me? Kevin Boyle and the Rise of the Human Rights Movement, his books include China Live: People, Power, and Television Revolution (1999), Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis (2008), and The Last POW (2014).
Professor Hurst Hannum
Hurst Hannum is Professor of International Law Emeritus at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, where he has taught human rights law and related courses since 1990. He first collaborated with Kevin Boyle in the early 1970s, when they were co-counsel before the European Commission of Human Rights in a case that challenged the widespread practice of torture and ill-treatment of suspected IRA members and supporters in Northern Ireland. Hannum's most recent book is Rescuing Human Rights: A Radically Moderate Approach (Cambridge Univ. Press 2019).
Aisling Reidy
Aisling Reidy has served as senior legal advisor at Human Rights Watch since 2006, focusing on Europe and Central Asia, the Americas, and several African states. She has taught international humanitarian law and human rights law at a university level.
Previously, Reidy, an Irish Barrister, was the director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. She also worked in The Hague as a trial lawyer in the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. During her career, Reidy has litigated multiple cases before the European Court of Human Rights and has appeared on behalf of Turkey’s Kurdish victims of rights violations. Immediately after the Kosovo War, she worked in Kosovo as senior human rights analyst for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, where amongst other responsibilities she worked with families of the “disappeared” as the head of a victim identification and recovery program.
She is a fellow of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex, in the United Kingdom, and was a senior research fellow at University College London. She holds a law degree from the National University of Ireland and a master’s in international human rights law from the University of Essex.
Tom Hadden
Tom Hadden worked with Kevin Boyle from their different communal backgrounds for over 40 years, first on security policies and Diplock Court trials in the 1970s, on potential political responses under the Anglo-Irish Agreement in the 1980s and then on the promised Northern Ireland Bill of Rights. Together they wrote a series of influential books, research reports and newspaper articles and took part in many radio and television programmes. He was the founding editor of the recently revived Fortnight Magazine in which most of their work was first published.