Juan E. Méndez
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Juan E. Méndez (born 11 December 1944) is an Argentine lawyer and academic who served as the United Nations Secretary-General's Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. He was named to the newly-created post on 14 July 2004 by Kofi Annan. He is currently the President of the International Center for Transitional Justice, located in New York City.
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[edit] Duties as Special Adviser
He has focused much of his attention since 2004 on the Darfur conflict in Sudan, issuing a report in 2005 after visiting the area.[1] He is an endorser of the Genocide Intervention Network.
[edit] Background
Immediately prior to his appointment with the United Nations, Méndez was serving as president of the International Center for Transitional Justice. A native of Lomas de Zamora in Buenos Aires Province, Méndez dedicated his legal career to the defense of human rights. As a result of his involvement in representing political prisoners, he was arrested and subjected to torture and administrative detention for a year and a half during the Argentine military dictatorship. During this time, Amnesty International adopted him as a “prisoner of conscience”. After his release from detention in the late 1970s, Méndez moved to the United States.
For 15 years, he worked with Human Rights Watch, concentrating his efforts on human rights issues in the Western hemisphere. In 1994, he became general counsel of Human Rights Watch, with worldwide duties in support of the organization’s mission, including responsibility for the organization’s litigation and standard-setting activities. From 1996 to 1999, Méndez was the executive director of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights in Costa Rica. Between October 1999 and May 2004 he was a professor of law and director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame in the U.S.. Between 2000 and 2003 he was a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, and served as its president in 2002.
He has taught international human rights law at Georgetown Law School, the University of Notre Dame School of Law, and at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in the United States. He also teaches regularly at the Oxford Master’s Programme in International Human Rights Law in the United Kingdom.
He is the recipient of several human rights awards, the most recent being the inaugural “Monsignor Óscar A. Romero Award for Leadership in Service to Human Rights” by the University of Dayton in April 2000, and the “Jeanne and Joseph Sullivan Award” of the Heartland Alliance in May 2003. Méndez is a member of the bars of Mar del Plata and Buenos Aires, Argentina, and of the District of Columbia, United States, having earned a J.D. from Stella Maris University in Argentina and a certificate from the American University, Washington College of Law.
Méndez is married with three children.
