Anne Bayefsky

Website: http://www.bayefsky.com
Residence: New York City, New York

Biographical information
Anne Bayefsky is a Senior Fellow of the Hudson Institute, and a visiting professor at Metropolitan and Touro Colleges in New York. From 2001 to 2004 she was a visiting professor and an associate research scholar at Columbia University Law School. In 1996, Bayefsky joined the Department of Political Science at York University in Toronto as a Full Professor. She is currently on leave. From 1996 to 1999, she was the Director of York's Centre for Refugee Studies. From 1981 to 1996, Bayefsky was a professor of constitutional and international law at the University of Ottawa.

In January 2003, she launched http://www.bayefsky.com, a human rights website dedicated to enhancing the implementation of the human rights legal standards of the United Nations. A highly-regarded international human rights legal database, the site has attracted over 800,000 visitors from 181 countries.

Bayefsky has been the recipient of many honors, including the Bora Laskin National Fellowship in Human Rights Research, Canada's annual premier human rights research fellowship (1992), and a MacArthur Foundation grant in Peace and International Cooperation (1995-96).

She is a member of the International Law Association Committee on Human Rights Law and Practice and the Editor-in-Chief of the series "Refugees and Human Rights," published by Brill.

In 2001, she was a delegate of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists and UN Watch to the UN Durban World Conference Against Racism. She has served as an academic member of the Canadian Delegations to several international meetings, including the U.N. Human Rights Commission (1993-1996), the U.N. General Assembly (1984 and 1989), and the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights (1993). In 1995, she was a delegate of the American Society of International Law to the Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women.

She holds a B.A., M.A. and LL.B. from the University of Toronto and a M.Litt. from Oxford University. She is a barrister and solicitor of the Ontario Bar.

Bayefsky is a frequent contributor to the editorial pages of newspapers, periodicals and online journals including: National Review Online, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The Jerusalem Post, Globe & Mail (Canada), the Chicago Sun-Times, and The New York Sun. She has appeared on CNN, FOX, and MSNBC, and is a frequent radio commentator on such channels as WABC. She is the author or editor of several books, including: How to Complain to the UN Human Rights Treaty System (2002); The UN Human Rights Treaty System: Universality at the Crossroads (2001); The UN Human Rights Treaty System in the Twenty-First Century (2000); Human Rights and Forced Displacement (2000); Self-Determination in International Law: Quebec and Lessons Learned (2000).

Discussion topics

• The UN and the American Taxpayer Dollar: Withdraw or Reform?
  The United Nations has been rocked by a series of scandals from oil-for-food, to peacekeepers abusing the refugees they were assigned to protect, to serving as a platform for anti-semitism and the demonization of the state of Israel. The U.S. taxpayer pays 22% of the UN's annual regular budget. Are these dollars well-spent? Should reform be a prerequisite for continuing American engagement in the UN, and if so, what reform should Congress and American democratic allies require?
• The United Nations, Israel and Anti-semitism
  The United Nations was founded on the ashes of the Holocaust. Today, however, the U.N. provides a platform for those who cast the victims of the Nazis as the Nazi counterparts of the 21st century. The U.N. has become the leading global purveyor of anti-Semitism--intolerance and inequality against the Jewish people and its state. How has this happened? What is the record? What can and should be done about it?
• Confronting the Human Rights Weapon: Legitimate criticism or Anti-semitism?
  Human rights are the most powerful political currency of our time. Today, the language and mechanisms of human rights have been used as weapons to attack Israel and the Jewish people, particularlly across American campuses and universities throughout the Western world. How do we confront the hijacking of human rights principles, the inflammatory and false labels such as apartheid-Israel, and redirect the energy of the concerned and compassionate to democracy's real foes?

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