Korean Studies Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center is hosting an international workshop on South Korean economic affairs on March 18-19 sponsored by Koret Foundation.  Leading scholars and former senior officials from Korea and the United States will explore key aspects of economic globalization and Korea's role, from policies and politics to the economic prospects of a unified Korean. This lecture is offered as a public event on the first day of the workshop for a larger audience from the community and the Bay area.

Ambassador Han was appointed by President Lee, Myung-bak as the new Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United States of the America on January 18, 2009. He presented his Letter of Credence to President Barack Obama on May 20, 2009.

Before the appointment, Ambassador Han served as the 38th Prime Minister of the Republic of Korea after his nomination was approved by the National Assembly on April 2, 2007, and he worked in that capacity until February 2008.

Prior to serving as Prime Minister, Ambassador Han held numerous high-ranking positions in the Korean government. In 2006, he was named Chairman of the Presidential Committee on Facilitating KORUS FTA following his service as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance and Economy. Before being named Minister of Government Policy Coordination in early 2004, he worked as President of the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade.

As Korea’s Permanent Representative to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Ambassador Han went to Paris in 2001 before returning to Seoul later that year to serve at the Blue House, first as Senior Secretary to the President for Policy and Planning and later as Senior Secretary to the President for Economic Affairs. 

Ambassador Han was the Minister for Trade at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade from 1998 to 2001. Previously, he was Assistant Minister for International Trade and Vice Minister at the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy. From 1993 to 1994, he served as Secretary to the President for Economic Affairs.

During his distinguished career in government, Ambassador Han has made many contributions to the development and modernization of the Korean economy.  Deregulation, market opening and strengthening of the market economy have been the three pillars of his philosophy and framework for the economic policy of Korea.

Ambassador Han earned a B.A. in economics from Seoul National University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.  He has been awarded two Order of Public Service and Merit Medals.

This event is supported by a generous grant from the Koret Foundation.

Since World War II, a major element of globalization has involved the expansion of human rights norms, rules, and institutions.  This broad movement represents a dramatic shift from earlier emphases on the rights and duties of citizens of national states.  The human rights movement stresses universal and global rights, and the general responsibility to support these rights anywhere in the world, independent of national sovereignty boundaries.  This research project focuses both on the expansion of the human rights movement at the global level and the impact of the movement on national states and societies around the world. 
 
Research studies in the program track, and attempt to account for, the rapid expansion of human rights treaties, inter-governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, and popular and professional discourse advocating human rights.  The studies also track the rapid expansion of the substantive rights involved, from simple principles of protection and due process to greatly expanded human rights to active cultural and political participation and self-expression.  And the studies track the expansion, over the whole post-War period, of the groups particularly emphasized in the human rights movement women, children, older people, indigenous people, poor people, handicapped people, gay and lesbian people, and members of all sorts of religious and ethnic minorities. 
 
Since 1970, the world human rights movement has expanded its earlier focus on the legal protections of the individual person, to a more empowered and empowering focus on human rights education.  And studies in the program now focus heavily on the expansion worldwide of human rights education.

Born in Tunis in 1957, Laurent Cohen-Tanugi is a Paris-based international lawyer, policy adviser and public intellectual.

A member of the Paris and New York Bars, his practice focuses on cross-border mergers and acquisitions, international arbitration, competition law, and policy advisory work. In the fall of 2007, he was appointed by the French government to lead a task force on the future of the European Union's Lisbon Strategy, ahead of the French Presidency of the EU ("Beyond Lisbon: A European Strategy For Globalisation", Peter Lang, 2008, www.euroworld2015.eu).

He was previously a partner of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP (2005-2007), Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Sanofi-Synthélabo, a European pharmaceutical group (2004), and a partner of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton (1991-2003). In recent years, he was involved in substantial cross-border mergers such as Vivendi Universal, Sanofi-Aventis and Alcatel-Lucent.

Mr Cohen-Tanugi is an alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and holds an agrégation in French literature from the University of Paris and a degree from the Institute of Political Studies of Paris.  He graduated from the University of Paris Law School in 1981 and received an LL.M. degree from the Harvard Law School in 1982. 

He is the author of numerous influential books, including Le Droit sans l'Etat (PUF, 1985), a comparative essay on the French and American legal and political traditions, prefaced by Professor Stanley Hoffmann of Harvard University; La Métamorphose de la Démocratie (Odile Jacob, 1989), on the changes affecting the French and European democratic cultures since the late sixties; L'Europe en danger (Fayard, 1992), anticipating the current crisis of political Europe; Le Choix de l'Europe (Fayard, 1995), on the future of European unification, and Le Nouvel ordre numérique (Odile Jacob, 1999), a multi-disciplinary analysis of the communications and information technology revolution. 

His latest English-language works include An Alliance At Risk, The United States And Europe After September 11 (Johns Hopkins University Press, September 2003), exploring the present state and future prospects of transatlantic relations, and The End of Europe? (Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005, Volume 84., No. 6), an analysis of the state of the EU following the French and Dutch rejections of the EU constitutional treaty, and most recently, The Shape of the World to Come, on the geopolitics of globalization (Columbia University Press, 2008), which will also be published in China.

Laurent Cohen-Tanugi is a regular columnist in French newspapers Les Echos and Le Monde, and lectures on a variety of subjects internationally. A director of Notre Europe, a think-tank founded by former EC Commission President Jacques Delors, he is actively involved in European policy-making. He is also a member of the French Academy of Technologies and a director of several think-tanks, including the Fondation pour l'innovation politique. A frequent consultant to the French government, he sat on the Commission on Judicial Reform set up by President Chirac in 1997, and on the Commission on the Intangible Economy set up by the French government in 2006. He is also a member of the Policy Advisory Council of the French-American Foundation.

Mr. Cohen-Tanugi taught a seminar in European affairs at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris from 2005 to 2008 and will be teaching a course on Transatlantic Merger and Acquisitions at the Harvard Law School in the spring of 2009. Laurent Cohen-Tanugi is the advisor to the Polish government in preparation for his upcoming presidency of the EU in 2011.

Steve Coll is president of New America Foundation, and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. Previously he spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent and senior editor at The Washington Post, serving as the paper's managing editor from 1998 to 2004. He is the author of six books, including The Deal of the Century: The Break Up of AT&T (1986); The Taking of Getty Oil (1987); Eagle on the Street, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the SEC's battle with Wall Street (with David A. Vise, 1991); On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia (1994), Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004); and The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (2008).

Mr. Coll's professional awards include two Pulitzer Prizes. He won the first of these, for explanatory journalism, in 1990, for his series, with David A. Vise, about the SEC. His second was awarded in 2005, for his book, Ghost Wars, which also won the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross award; the Overseas Press Club award and the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book published on international affairs during 2004. Other awards include the 1992 Livingston Award for outstanding foreign reporting; the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award for his coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone; and a second Overseas Press Club Award for international magazine writing. Mr. Coll graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Cum Laude, from Occidental College in 1980 with a degree in English and history. He lives in Washington, D.C.