Patricia Isasa, a successful architect in Argentina, is a survivor of torture and imprisonment from the age of 16 to 18 during the Argentine dictatorship. She was imprisoned in 1976.  Twenty years later she almost single handedly investigated the identities of 8 perpetrators of the crimes against her and others.  Because of an impunity law in Argentina at the time, she took her case to Judge Baltasar Garzon in Spain who requested extradition, which was denied. In 2009 her case was finally tried in Argentina.

Six perpetrators were found guilty of human rights violations.  Her trial is one of the first trials of the Argentine military and police. Patricia is now helping others with their cases and is working with President Cristina Kirchner to investigate the takeover of Papel Prensa in the 70s by the then and present media giant Clarin, which has resulted in extensive corporate control of the media in Argentina.

Sponsored by

Program on Human Rights, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies,

Center for Latin American Studies,

and Arroyo House 

Join us for a discussion on human rights and environmental justice implications surrounding the BP oil spill from regulatory, litigation and conceptual perspectives.

Introduced and moderated by Dr. Helen Stacy, Co-ordinator, Program on Human Rights in the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law and Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute.

Panelists:

Meg Caldwell, Director, Environmental and Natural Resources Law & Policy Program; Executive Director, Center for Ocean Solutions, Woods Institute for the Environment. Professor Caldwell's scholarship focuses on the environmental effects of local land use decisions, the use of science in environmental and marine resource policy development and implementation, and developing private and public incentives for natural resource conservation.

Deborah Sivas, Luke W. Cole Professor of Environmental Law and Director, Environmental Law Clinic. Professor Sivas's current research is focused on the interaction of law and science in the arena of climate change and coastal/marine policy and the ability of the public to hold policymakers accountable.

Ursula Heise, Director, Program in Modern Thought & Literature and Professor of English; member of the Executive Committee of the Program in Science, Technology & Society; Affiliated Faculty of the Woods Institute for the Environment. Author of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, (forthcoming) and The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature (in progress).

Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell." So opens Mao's Great Famine: A History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, Frank Dikötter's riveting and magnificently detailed chronicle of the Great Leap Forward. Using previously restricted archives, historian Dikötter reveals that under this initiative the country became the site not only of one of the most deadly mass killings of human history (at least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death) but also the greatest demolition of real estate - and catastrophe for the natural environment - in human history, as up to a third of all housing was turned to rubble and the land savaged in the maniacal pursuit of steel and other industrial accomplishments. Piecing together both the vicious machinations in the corridors of power and the everyday experiences of ordinary people, Dikötter at last gives voice to the dead and disenfranchised.

Frank Dikötter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of the Modern History of China on leave from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has published nine books on  modern China, from the classic The Discourse of Race in Modern China(1992) to China before Mao: The Age of Openness (2007). 

**Books will be available for purchase during this event.**

For the last decade, China has been at the forefront of pushing for regional economic integration, e.g. ASEAN-China FTA, Hong Kong-China CEPA, and China-Taiwan ECFA. Could this process culminate into a movement toward a European Union-style economic bloc? What are the implications of this development for US economic welfare? US unions have long viewed the cheap goods from China as harmful to US workers; and some US economists have recently blamed the cheap credit from China for the 2008 implosion of the US financial system. The present escalation of Chinese and US rhetoric on the exchange rate is worryingly akin to the mutual pawing on the ground before the great leap forward at each other. What is the sensible solution? There is no sign that the impasse over the Doha Round of trade negotiations would be resolved in the medium-term.  It is very surprising that China has adopted a near hands-off approach on this issue because it has been the biggest beneficiary of the open multilateral trading system. Has China's failure to help strengthen the WTO framework emboldened protectionism, much to its own detriment and the world's? In this seminar, Professor Woo will examine China's strategy of external economic engagement, including the recently signed ECFA between Beijing and Taipei. Woo argues that part (and only part) of the reason why China does not already have a coherent strategy could be that its present governance institutions create disincentives to move quickly to embrace such a strategy.  

Wing Thye Woo is Professor of Economics at U.C. Davis, Yangtze River Scholar at the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, Director of the East Asia Program within The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He received an M.A. in Economics from Yale University, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. He has advised the U.S. Treasury Department, the IMF, World Bank, and the United Nations. Professor Woo has published extensively, and his current research focuses on the economic issues of East Asia, international financial architecture, comparative economic growth, state enterprise restructuring, fiscal management, and exchange rate economics.