Home > Justice Goldstone Will Give Public Talk at Yale
Justice Goldstone Will Give Public Talk at Yale
January 5, 2010. New Haven, CT – Richard J. Goldstone, former South African Constitutional Court Judge and author of The Goldstone Report on the Gaza Conflict, will give the George Herbert Walker, Jr. Lecture in International Studies at Yale on January 27.
His talk, titled "Accountability for War Crimes," will be held at 4 p.m. in Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue. Sponsored by the MacMillan Center, it is free and open to the public.
After graduating from the University of the Witwatersrand with a BA LLB cum laude in 1962 he practiced as an Advocate at the Johannesburg Bar. In 1976, he was appointed Senior Counsel and in 1980 was made Judge of the Transvaal Supreme Court. In 1989, he was appointed judge of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court. From July 1994 to October 2003 he was a justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Since the spring of 2004, Justice Goldstone has been teaching as a visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School, NYU Law School, Fordham Law School and Georgetown Law School.
In April 2004, he was appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to the Independent International Committee, chaired by Paul Volcker, to investigate the Iraq Oil for Food program. He is co-chair of the Human Rights Institute of the International Bar Association. He chaired a UN Committee to advise the United Nations on appropriate steps to preserve the archives and legacy of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. His most recent appointment is to lead the UN Fact Finding Mission on Gaza established by the President of the United Nations Human Rights Council.
From 1991 to 1994, he served as Chairperson of the Commission of Inquiry regarding Public Violence and Intimidation that came to be known as the Goldstone Commission. He was the Chairperson of the Standing Advisory Committee of Company Law from 1984 to 2004. From August 15, 1994 to September 1996 he served as the Chief Prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. During 1998 he was the chairperson of a high level group of international experts that met in Valencia, Spain, and drafted a Declaration of Human Duties and Responsibilities for the director general of UNESCO (the Valencia Declaration). From August 1999 until December 2001, he was the chairperson of the International Independent Inquiry on Kosovo. In December 2001 he was appointed as the cochairperson of the International Task Force on Terrorism that was established by the International Bar Association. He is a director of the American Arbitration Association. From 1999 to 2003, he served as a member of the International Group of Advisers of the International Committee of the Red Cross. From 1985 to 2000, Justice Goldstone was national president of the National Institute of Crime Prevention and the Rehabilitation of Offenders (NICRO).
From 1995 to 2007 he was the chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The many awards he has received locally and internationally include the International Human Rights Award of the American Bar Association (1994) and honorary doctorates of law from universities in South Africa, Europe, North America and Israel. He is an honorary bencher of the Inner Temple, London, an honorary fellow of St Johns College, Cambridge, an honorary member of the Association of the Bar of New York, and a fellow of the Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs at Harvard University. He is a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been a member of the faculty of the Salzburg Seminar since 1996. In October 2006 he shared with Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Thomas J. Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights. In May, 2007 he received the Richard E. Neustadt Award from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In January 2007 he received the World Peace Through Law Award from the Whitney Harris Institute for Global Legal Studies at International Law at Washington University in St. Louis. In May 2009, he will receive the International Justice Award of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
He is the author of For Humanity: Reflections of a War Crime Investigator (2001, Yale University Press), and the co-author of International Judicial Institutions: The Architecture of International Justice at Home and Abroad (2008, Routledge).
George Herbert Walker III, formerly the U.S. ambassador to Hungary, established this lecture series in 1986 in memory of his father, a graduate of the Yale Class of 1927. Previous George Herbert Walker, Jr. Lecturers in International Studies have included Jesus Silva-Herzog, David Lange, Bruce Gelb, Paul Wolfowitz, Edward Jaycox, George Schultz, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Madeleine Albright, Brent Scowcroft, James Baker III, George Mitchell, Richard Holbrooke, Carla Hills, Richard Haass, John Lukacs, Strobe Talbott, Christopher Hill, and Zbigniew Brzezinski.