Craig Mokhiber

Saturday, April 18 | 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM EDT

Craig Mokhiber is an international lawyer and specialist in human rights law, policy, and methodology who has spent four decades in the international human rights movement, including more than twenty-seven years at the United Nations. He is currently Director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has held senior UN positions in Geneva, New York and in the field, and has undertaken human rights missions to dozens of countries across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

He has served as the UN’s Senior Human Rights Advisor in Palestine, and in Afghanistan, led the team of human rights specialists attached to the High Level Mission on Darfur, headed the Rule of Law and Democracy Unit, and served as Chief of the Economic and Social Issues Section, and Chief of the Development and Economic and Social Issues Branch at OHCHR Headquarters. He was for five years the Chairman of the UN Task Force for Action Two (a global initiative to advance national human rights protection systems), and later Chaired the UN Democracy Fund consultative group, the UN Working Group on Leadership, and the UN-HLCP Consultative group on Inequalities. He has also led several initiatives aimed at integrating human rights into the work of the UN itself.

Craig Mokhiber has lectured and taught human rights, has authored several publications on human rights themes, and has served on the Secretariats of the World Conference on Human Rights (1993), the Commission on Human Rights (1995), the Working Group on the Right to Development (2001), and the World Summit (2005). He represented the UN human rights office in the LDC-IV Conference in Istanbul in 2011, in the UN working group on the human rights of older persons in 2012, in the Rio+20 negotiations in 2012, in the UN Sustainable Development Summit in 2015, the Paris Climate Conference in 2015, in the UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants in 2016, and in negotiations on the Global Compact on Migration in 2017-18. While on leave from the UN in 1999, he led a global study on human rights and rule of law reforms, on behalf of the International Council on Human Rights Policy. Before joining the UN, he worked as an NGO activist, a human rights advocate, and a lawyer in private practice.

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