Dr. Robert R. King became the Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues in November 2009 following confirmation by the United States Senate.

Prior to his appointment, Ambassador King worked on Capitol Hill for 25 years – 24 of those years as Chief of Staff to Congressman Tom Lantos (D-California). Ambassador King was heavily involved in the planning and conduct of Lantos’ human rights agenda, including the establishment and supervision of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, (which recently became the Tom Lantos Congressional Human Rights Commission). Dr. King traveled with Congressman Lantos to North Korea and played a key role in the passage of the 2004 North Korean Human Rights Act. He was concurrently Staff Director of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U. S. House of Representatives (2007-2008), Democratic Staff Director of the Committee (2001-2007) and held various professional staff positions on the Committee since 1993.

Prior to his service on Capitol Hill, Ambassador King served on the National Security Council Staff as a White House Fellow during the Carter Administration. He was Assistant Director of Research and Analysis at Radio Free Europe in Munich, Germany. Ambassador King holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and has authored five books and some 40 articles on international relations.

Professor David Kinley holds the Chair in Human Rights Law at University of Sydney, and is the Law Faculty's Associate-Dean (International). He is also an Academic Panel member of Doughty Street Chambers in London, the UK's leading human rights practice. He has previously held positions at Cambridge University, The Australian National University, the University of New South Wales, Washington College of Law, American University, and was the founding Director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law at Monash University (2000-2005). He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in 2004, based in Washington DC, and Herbert Smith Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge in 2008. He is author and editor of eight books and more than 80 articles, book chapters, reports and papers.

He has worked for 15 years as a consultant and adviser on international and domestic human rights law in Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, Thailand, Iraq, Nepal, Laos, China, and Myanmar/Burma, and for such organizations as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, AusAID, and the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions, and a number of transnational corporations, and NGOs.  He has also previously worked for three years with the Australian Law Reform Commission and two years with the Australian Human Rights Commission.

His latest publications include the critically acclaimed Civilising Globalisation: Human Rights and the Global Economy (CUP, 2009), Corporations and Human Rights (Ashgate 2009), and The World Trade Organisation and Human Rights: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Edward Elgar, 2009) Another edited collection entitled Principled Engagement: Promoting Human Rights in Pariah States will be published by UNU Publications in 2011.  He is currently working on another book investigating the interrelations between human rights and global finance.

David was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and brought up there during the 1960s and 70s.  He studied in England in the 1980s at Sheffield Hallam University and the Universities of Sheffield and Cambridge, and after obtaining his doctorate from the latter in 1990 he moved to Australia.  He now lives in Sydney with his wife and three children.

"Teaching Human Rights" is a series of events beginning at Stanford during the 2010-11 academic year. The series is organized by the Program on Human Rights of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and supported by the Center for Teaching and Learning.

The series will:

• Complement the growing attention to human rights across academic disciplines and professional schools with a practical, multidisciplinary discussion focused on the classroom.
• Help Stanford-affiliated graduate students and teaching assistants/fellows prepare to teach human rights topics during their graduate career and beyond. For example, the series will address the issue of balancing the tremendous breadth of conceptual and historical material a human rights course could potentially cover with opportunities for active learning and students' reflections on their own values.
• Provide Stanford faculty with pedagogical support for incorporating human rights themes into courses in various disciplines, and encourage a classroom-centered dialogue between the disciplines and schools.

Professor Wein received his PhD in Operations Research from Stanford in 1988 and has taught core MBA courses in operations management throughout his entire career, both at MIT's Sloan School of Management from 1988 to 2002 and, since 2002, at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, where he is currently Paul  E. Holden Professor of Management Science. He has also been a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at FSI since 2003.

Since 2001, Wein has analyzed a variety of homeland security problems. His homeland security work includes four papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: one on an emergency response to a smallpox attack,  a second on an emergency response to an anthrax attack, a third presenting a biometric analysis of the US-VISIT Program, and a fourth analyzing a bioterror attack on the milk supply. He has also published the Washington Post op-ed "Unready for Anthrax" (2003) and the New York Times op-ed "Got Toxic Milk?" (2005) and has written papers on port security, indoor remediation after an anthrax attack, and the detention and removal of illegal aliens.  He was also Editor-in-Chief of Operations Research from 2000 to 2005. Wein has won several awards, including the 1993 Erlang Prize for the outstanding applied probabilist under 35 years of age and the 2002 Koopman Prize for the best paper in military operations research.