Newton, MA--The Owen M. Kupferschmid Holocaust/Human Rights Project is pleased to announce that a memorial panel honoring the organization’s founder will take place on Thursday, December 1st, 2011 at 4 pm in room 200 of the Law School’s East Wing.

“Remembering Owen Kupferschmid: The Age of Accountability, Two Decades On” will celebrate the life of the Owen Kupferschmid and his work promoting accountability for human rights violations world-wide. Panelists will discuss their perspectives on the evolution of accountability for human rights violations over the past 20 years. 

Named for its founder, a 1986 law school graduate, the Holocaust/Human Rights Project helps to ensure that the precedential value of Holocaust-related law is fully realized and applied to state-sponsored human rights violations today. The project also organizes major conferences to address specific legal issues related to the Holocaust and other human rights violations, such as the annual Kupferschmid lecture.

The featured speakers are:

Eli Rosenbaum

Eli M. Rosenbaum was the director of the U.S. DOJ Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which was primarily responsible for identifying and deport­ing Nazi war criminals, from 1995 to 2010, when OSI was merged into the new Human Rights and Special Prosecution Section. He is now the Director of Strategy and Policy in the new Section. He was a trial attorney with OSI from 1980 to 1984. In 1984, Rosenbaum left the Department to work as a cor­porate litigator and then as general counsel for the World Jewish Congress. He later returned to OSI in 1988 where he was appointed as Principal Deputy Director.

P. Sabin Willett

P. Sabin Willett is a partner at the Bingham Mc­Cutchen law firm in Boston who has led the firm’s pro bono team representing prisoners at Guanta­namo Bay since 2005. Mr. Willett’s leadership in defense of the unlawful detention of Uighurs by the United States at Guantanamo led to several victories and the release of prisoners who were no longer deemed “enemy combatants”. He is a frequent writer and lecturer on Guantanamo and the War on Terror.

Allan A. Ryan

Allan A. Ryan, Jr. was appointed the first Director of the Office of Special Investigations, U.S. Department of Justice in 1980. In this position, he was responsible for the investigation and prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the United States. Since 1985, Mr. Ryan has been an attorney at Harvard University and Harvard Busi­ness School. In addition to teaching human rights law at Boston College Law School, he has served as a con­sultant on genocide prosecutions to the government of Rwanda and participated in several international con­ferences on how governments should face the crimes of predecessor regimes.

Ruti Teitel

Ruti Teitel is the Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Compara­tive Law at New York Law School and Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Next year, she will be a Straus Fellow at New York University Law School’s Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Jus­tice (2012-2013). She has taught at Yale, Fordham and Tel Aviv Law Schools, as well as Columbia University’s Politics Dept. and its School of International and Public Affairs. She is the founding co-chair of the American Society of International Law, Interest Group on Transi­tional Justice and Rule of Law. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and is a member of the International Law Association Human Rights Com­mittee, London and US.