Eric Stover, Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center and Adjunct Professor of Law and Public Health, University of California, Berkeley School of Law, USA

ADDRESS: The Disappeared, Land Mines, and Child Soldiers: Responding to Survivors and Communities

What are the specialized needs of survivors of forced disappearances, land mines, and the recruitment of child soldiers? How have health professionals, forensic scientists, and community activists responded to these needs? And what can be done to prevent these violations of international humanitarian and human rights law? This presentation will describe how research can be used to help survivors and their communities rebuild their lives, obtain justice, and prevent future violence.

Eric Stover is Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center and Adjunct Professor of Law and Public Health, University of California at Berkeley. Stover has built the Human Rights Center into a premier interdisciplinary research and policy center that is highly regarded nationally and internationally. He is a pioneer in utilizing empirical research methods to address emerging issues in human rights and international humanitarian law.

Before coming to Berkeley in 1996, Stover served as the Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights and the Director of the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served on several forensic missions to investigate mass graves as an "Expert on Mission" to the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In the early 1990s, Stover conducted the first research on the social and medical consequences of land mines in Cambodia and other post-war countries. His research helped launch the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, which received the Nobel Prize in 1997. He has published six books, including The Witnesses: War Crimes and the Promises of Justice in The Hague and The Breaking of Bodies and Minds: Torture, Psychiatric Abuse, and the Health Professions. He is a member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Transitional Justice and Human Rights Quarterly and a board member of the Crimes of War Project.