Symposium

JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM AFRO-DESCENDANTS AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN: LEGAL RIGHTS AND REALITIES

University of Pennsylvania Law School

PANELIST BIOGRAPHIES

Keynote Lecture. Sir Clare K. Roberts, KCN, QC, BA, LLB (HONS), LEC, TEP

Sir Clare was until recently a member of the Inter American Commission on Human Rights. He was elected in 2001 and was re-elected in 2005. In 2006 he was the President of the Commission.

Sir Clare was the first Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Afro-Descendants and Against Racial Discrimination and Racism. He has spearheaded the fight by the Inter –American Commission on Human Rights against racial discrimination in the hemisphere. He has studied and reported on the situation of Afro- descendants in Brazil, Columbia, and the Caribbean including Cuba, the United States and Canada.

In 2006 Sir Clare was knighted for his work in human rights, and his service to the legal profession and youth.

Sir Clare is a former Attorney General of Antigua and Barbuda, British Virgin Islands and Montserrat. He was the Chief Parliamentary Counsel and Solicitor General in Antigua and Barbuda. He is the principal of Roberts & Co, Attorneys at Law, which he founded in Antigua and Barbuda in 1986.

Panel 1. Comparative Perspectives: Citizenship, Identity and Racial Discrimination in Latin America and the Caribbean

Professor Tanya K. Hernandez earned an A.B. in sociology from Brown University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. She has been a law professor for over 13 years, and presently teaches Comparative Employment Discrimination, Critical Race Theory, and Trusts and Estates, at Fordham University School of Law. Her scholarly interest is in the study of comparative race relations. Her work in that area has been published in the California Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Harvard Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and many other publications. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and Hispanic Business Magazine selected her as one of the 100 Most Influential Hispanics of 2007.

Professor Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Latino & Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is the author of National Performances: Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and co-author of Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and the Politics of Race and Citizenship (Routledge, 2003). She has also published various articles on issues of citizenship, race, and space in relation to U.S. Latinos and Latin American populations. Her current work focuses on contemporary conceptions of “racial democracy” and the anthropology of affect among Brazilian and Puerto Rican youth in Newark, NJ, Belo Horizonte (Brazil), and Santurce (Puerto Rico). In the 2009-10 academic year she is serving as Acting Chair of the Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers-New Brunswick.

Professor Deborah A. Thomas is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Graduate Group in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and The Politics of Culture in Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2004), and co-editor of the volume Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2006). Her book Exceptional Violence: Dramas of Space and Citizenship in Jamaica, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Thomas has also co-edited special issues of the journals Identities and Feminist Review, and is currently editor of the journal Transforming Anthropology. Prior to her life as an academic, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women.

Panel 2. Legal Rights in Action: Environmental Justice and International Trade in Latin America and the Caribbean

Professor Colin Crawford is Professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law, in Atlanta, where he founded and co-directs the Center for the Comparative Study of Metropolitan Growth. Center programs developed by Professor Crawford provide an opportunity to engage in comparative scholarship on the effects worldwide of urbanization on the physical and built environment. His own scholarship and teaching focuses on environmental and land use law and in recent years has been mostly devoted to comparative environmental work in the Americas, especially in Brazil and Colombia. In 2005, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. In May 2009, Professor Crawford received a $650,000, three-year grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development/Higher Education for Development to build environmental law capacity at institutions of higher learning in Central America and the Caribbean, specifically in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

Professor Carmen G. Gonzalez holds a B.A. in Political Science from Yale University and J.D. from Harvard Law School. She clerked for Judge Thelton E. Henderson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and was a litigation associate at Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro in San Francisco, California. Prior to joining the law faculty at Seattle University, she was Assistant Regional Counsel in the San Francisco office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where she worked on U.S.-Mexican border environmental matters. Professor Gonzalez has taught environmental law and/or worked on environmental law projects in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Panama, China, Ukraine, and Moldova. During academic year 2004-2005, Professor Gonzalez served as one of four U.S. Supreme Court Fellows selected by a panel of distinguished lawyers and judges appointed by the Chief Justice. Professor Gonzalez writes and lectures on international environment law, food security, and international environmental justice.

Professor Ruth Gordon has represented the island nation of Vanuatu at the United Nations and served as the legal adviser to the island's Permanent Mission to the United Nations. She also co-authored the United Nations Council for Namibia's study addressing Namibia's violations of U.N. decrees and resolutions.

Professor Gordon received her J.D. from New York University School of Law, and her LL.M. from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. She was a Riesenfeld Fellow in Public International Law at the University of California at Berkeley. She was also a Revson Fellowship Scholar at The City College of the City University of New York Center for Legal Education & Urban Policy, where she developed and taught a two-semester course on international economic law from the perspective of developing countries.

Professor Gordon was a member of the Board of Directors of the American Society of International Law and the American Bar Association International Law and Practice Section. She is also a member of the American Bar Association Committee on World Order Under Law.

Professor Gordon’s scholarly interests focus on international law. She is the author of several articles on the various roles the United Nations plays in developing countries, including: Saving Failed States: Sometimes a Neocolonialist Notion, 12 Am. U. J. Int’l & Pol'y 903 (1997); Intervention by the United Nations: Iraq, Somalia, and Haiti, 31 Tex. Int'l L.J. 43 (1996); Some Legal Problems with Trusteeship, 28 Cornell Int’l L.J. 301, 306 (1995); United Nations Intervention in Internal Conflicts: Iraq, Somalia, and Beyond, 15 Mich. J. Int'l L. 519 (1994). Her latest article, Growing Constitutions, was published in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law.

Panel 3. Voices from the Field: Policy and Practice Perspectives

Meredith Gloger currently serves as Acting Resident Country Director for the International Republican Institute (IRI) in Colombia, where she oversees democracy-strengthening projects focusing on municipal good governance, political party policy development, and the participation of Afro-descendants and internally displaced persons in political processes. In 2006, Gloger established the Institute’s presence in Bogotá and supported the formation of a legislative bloc of Afro-Colombian congressmen, recognized nationwide as the Afro-Colombian Congressional Caucus. From 2004 through 2005, as a Program Officer for IRI, Gloger designed and implemented programs to strengthen political parties and civil society organizations throughout the Latin America region. During her four years in Colombia, Gloger also worked with AECOM International Development, where she helped lead the Public Policy Component of the USAID MIDAS (“More Investment for Sustainable Alternative Development”) Program. Gloger is currently volunteer Director of South America with One Million Lights, a non-profit organization which aims to provide environmentally friendly, solar lighting to further children's education and to improve the lives of people in rural communities in the developing world. She is from Marin County, California and received a B.A. in International Relations and Hispanic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004.

Ramona Miranda Ortega is founder of Cidadão Global, a transnational human rights organization serving Brazilian immigrants. Winner of the 2009 Union Square Award, Cidadao Global is the first Brazilian organization in New York City and is establishing a worker owned domestic workers cooperative. She is the former Director of the Human Rights Project of the Urban Justice Center in New York City and a native of California.

Ms. Ortega has more than a decade working in the area of social justice and human rights. In 2000 she coordinated a shadow report for submission to the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and participated in both the first and second review of the United States in Geneva. She was a delegate to the World Conference Against Racism in Durbin, South Africa and successfully lobbied for language in the final outcome document one education and spearheaded of the New York City Human Rights Initiative; a effort implement ICERD and CEDAW through innovative local legislation in NYC. She is a human rights trainer with an expertise in ICERD, economic rights and human rights documentation. Ms. Ortega continues to be involved in CERD implementation as a Senior Consultant with the US Human Rights Network.

She has published in Carnegie Council's Human Rights Dialogue and the Society for Anthropology of North America. Ms. Ortega has also worked as a journalist with CBS and LAWEEKLY and as a researcher with MDRC and the Kellogg Foundation's NY State Scholar Practitioner team. She most recently co-authored a report on human rights and the NYC family court system and a series of reports on workforce development for the Women of Color Policy Network at NYU’s Wagner School Public Service. Ms. Ortega is also also founder of Global Networks Consulting, a research and organizational development company.