Madeline Rees, Secretary General of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, began working for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights as the gender expert and Head of Office in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1998. In that capacity she worked extensively on the rule of law, gender and post conflict, transitional justice and the protection of social and economic rights. The OHCHR office dealt extensively with the issue of trafficking and Madeleine was a member of the expert coordination group of the trafficking task force of the Stability Pact, thence the Alliance against Trafficking. From September 2006 to April 2010 she was the head of the Women`s rights and gender unit.

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In her capacities as special representative, chair of the Stability Pact Task Force for South Eastern Europe and International Consultant she has provided assistance to governments and State authorities in developing national and transnational anti-trafficking strategies and in order to help improve their capacities to act on their own and in cooperation with others. From 2004 to 2006, she served as Special Representative on Combating Trafficking in Human Beings of the OSCE – Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. From 2000 to 2004, she served as regional co-ordinator and chair of the  EU Stability Pact Task Force on Human Trafficking for South Eastern Europe.

Human trafficking will be the theme of the PHR's Selena Diana Jenkins Speakers Series this academic year. Human trafficking is a crime that deprives people of their fundamental rights and freedoms. Human trafficking sustained by growing networks of organized crime is devastating for individual victims and can perpetuate the poverty cycle and hinder development in areas affected. The purpose of this Fall Workshop is to determine ways in which the winter series can assist faculty in their research and to match Stanford researchers with speakers for the winter series.

The Program on Human Rights Collaboratory Series is an interdisciplinary investigation of human rights in the humanities. It is funded under the Stanford Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies as the third in a sequence of pursuing peace and security, improving governance and advancing we

Maxine Burkett is an Associate Professor of Law at the William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai‘i and serves as the inaugural Director of the Center for Island Climate Adaptation and Policy (ICAP), at the University of Hawai‘i Sea Grant College Program.

Professor Burkett’s courses include Climate Change Law and Policy, Torts, Environmental Law, Race and American Law, and International Development. She has written in the area of Race, Reparations, and Environmental Justice. Currently, her work focuses on "Climate Justice," writing on the disparate impact of climate change on vulnerable communities, in the United States and globally. Her March 2007 conference "The Climate of Environmental Justice," at the University of Colorado, brought together leading academics, activists, and legal practitioners in the Environmental Justice field to consider the emerging interplay between race, poverty, and global warming.

Professor Burkett has presented her research on Climate Justice throughout the United States and in West Africa, Asia, Europe and the Caribbean. She most recently served as the Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics at the Wayne Morse Center, University of Oregon, as the Fall 2010 scholar for the Center’s “Climate Ethics and Climate Equity” theme of inquiry. She is the youngest scholar to hold the Wayne Morse Chair.

As the Director of ICAP, she leads projects to address climate change law, policy, and planning for island communities in Hawai‘i, the Pacific region, and beyond. In its first eighteen months, ICAP has completed several climate change adaptation related policy documents for Hawai‘i and other Pacific Island nations, specifically the Federated States of Micronesia. It has also hosted numerous outreach and education programs on island resiliency and climate change and engaged planning agencies in all four counties in Hawai‘i and seven state agencies and offices, as well as several federal entities and many state legislators. Most notably, ICAP has partnered with the Hawai‘i State Office of Planning to conduct early planning and assessment for a statewide Climate Change Adaptation Plan.

Professor Burkett attended Williams College and Exeter College, Oxford University, and received her law degree from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. She has worked in private practice in Honolulu with Davis, Levin, Livingston and Paul, Johnson, Park & Niles, and served as a law clerk with The Honorable Susan Illston of the United States District Court, Northern District of California. Prior to her appointment at the University of Hawai‘i, Professor Burkett taught at the University of Colorado Law School. Professor Burkett is from the island of Jamaica, and now she and her husband raise their two young children on the island of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i.