NEWS RELEASE

1/29/03

Lisa Trei, News Service: (650) 725-0224, lisatrei@stanford.edu

Relevant Web URLs:
http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/

Human Rights advocate Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, to deliver 2003 Tanner Lectures at Stanford

Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, will deliver this year's Tanner Lectures on Human Values Feb. 12 and 13.

The university's President's Office and the Program on Ethics in Society jointly sponsor the Tanner lectures and discussion seminars, which are free and open to the public.

On Feb. 12 at 5:45 p.m., Robinson will lecture on "Human Rights and Ethical Globalization" in Kresge Auditorium. The lecture will be followed by a discussion on Feb. 13 led by political science Professor Susan Okin and law Professor Deborah Rhode. The seminar will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Conference Room A in the Landau Economics Building at the corner of Serra Mall and Galvez Street.

On Feb. 13 at 7 p.m., Robinson will speak on "The Challenge of Human Rights Protection in Africa" in Kresge Auditorium. On Feb. 14 at 9 a.m., Hoover Senior Fellow Larry Diamond and political science Professor Emeritus David Abernethy will discuss the previous night's lecture during a seminar in Conference Room A in the Landau Economics Building.

Robinson was Ireland's first woman president from 1990 to 1997, and the United Nations high commissioner for human rights from 1997 to 2002. As high commissioner, Robinson turned the post into one of the organization's most high-profile departments. During her first year on the job, she traveled to Rwanda, South Africa, Colombia and Cambodia. In 1998, she visited China, signing an agreement supporting the improvement of human rights. She also strengthened human rights' monitoring in Kosovo, in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

An outspoken champion of the oppressed, Robinson has angered the governments of nations large and small for her uncompromising criticism of their human rights records. It has widely been reported that the Bush administration opposed extension of her term as high commissioner based on her defense of the controversial 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism, her views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and her condemnation of the U.S. treatment of prisoners at Camp X-Ray in Cuba's Guantánamo Bay.

After she left the United Nations, Robinson became director of the Ethical Globalization Initiative, a new venture established to support human rights. In this capacity, she continues to speak out about the link between AIDS/HIV and human rights. She is also honorary president of Oxfam International, a global nongovernmental group dedicated to fighting poverty and injustice.

As Ireland's president, Robinson became known as a strong supporter of women's rights and campaigned for the liberalization of laws prohibiting divorce and abortion. Internationally, she gained a reputation as a prominent human rights lawyer. As president, Robinson placed special emphasis on the needs of developing countries, linking the history of the Great Irish Famine to contemporary nutrition, poverty and policy issues worldwide. She became the first head of state to visit famine-stricken Somalia in 1992, and the first to go to Rwanda after the genocide there in 1994.

Before her election as president in 1990, Robinson served as senator for 20 years. In 1969, she became the youngest Reid Professor of Constitutional Law at Trinity College in Ireland. Robinson holds law degrees from King's Inns in Dublin, Ireland, and from Harvard.

The Tanner Lectures

The Tanner lectures are held annually at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the universities of California, Michigan and Utah, and in England at Cambridge and Oxford universities. Established in 1978 by Obert Clark Tanner, an industrialist, legal scholar and philosopher, the lectures are meant to advance and reflect upon the scholarly and scientific learning relating to human values.

Tanner earned a master's degree from Stanford in 1937 and was an instructor in the Religious Studies Department from 1939 to 1944. In 1945, Tanner joined the philosophy faculty at the University of Utah. He retired in 1972 and served as professor emeritus until his death in 1993.

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is a nonprofit corporation administered at the University of Utah. In 1927, Tanner began a business specializing in corporate recognition awards. Today, the O. C. Tanner Co. serves as the financial foundation for the Tanner philanthropies, which fund the lecture series.

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By Lisa Trei