A GLOBAL CHALLENGE
How to Defend Elections and Rights in Myanmar
Join us for an evening with
Human Rights Watch Executive Director (Asia Division)
Brad Adams
Preceded by UNA-NYC Annual Meeting 2021
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Thursday | 20 May 2021 | 6:00 to 7:15 p.m. EST
6:00 - 6:15 p.m. EST | UNA-NYC Annual Meeting
6:15 - 7:15 p.m. EST | Keynote Presentation with Q+A
Please join us at our Annual Meeting, when UNA-NYC will celebrate our accomplishments over the past year, and when our guest keynote speaker will be Brad Adams from Human Rights Watch.
Myanmar is in yet another crisis created by its military, the Tatmadaw. A February 1st coup put the country’s civilian leadership, including Aung San Suu Kyi, back in prison. Hundreds have been killed and thousands arrested.
Civil servants and others have formed the Civil Disobedience Movement, while courageous protestors continue to turn out in large number in the streets in the face of lethal force. The generals clearly miscalculated the public response, plunging the country into an economic crisis in the middle of a pandemic.
The coup followed the military’s 2017 ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, something Aung San Suu Kyi defended at the International Court of Justice. Also, the UN Security Council, through its veto process, has declined to address either the Rohingya crisis or the coup effectively.
Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, will discuss the current crisis and what the UN and its member states can and should be doing in response.
Keynote Speaker
BRAD ADAMS
Brad Adams, executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division since 2002, oversees the organization’s work on human rights issues in twenty countries, from Afghanistan to the Pacific. At Human Rights Watch, he has worked on a wide range of issues including freedom of expression, protection of civil society and human rights defenders, counterterrorism, refugees, gender and religious discrimination, armed conflict, and impunity. He has written for publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and Wall Street Journal.
Prior to Human Rights Watch, Adams worked in Cambodia for five years as the senior lawyer for the Cambodia field office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and as the legal advisor to the Cambodian parliament’s human rights committee, conducting human rights investigations, supervising a judicial reform program, and drafting and revising legislation. A former legal aid lawyer in California and founder of the Berkeley Community Law Center, Adams graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law. He teaches International Human Rights Law and Practice at Berkeley Law School and is a member of the California bar.