On August 19

On this day in ...
... 2011 (today), is marked World Humanitarian Day. (image credit) It's a date the United Nations and more than 500 nongovernmental organizations set aside to celebrate humanitarian aid work around the world. The date coincides with the 2003 Baghdad bombing that killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. Secretary-General's Special Representative in Iraq, and nearly 2 dozen others, including de Mello's chief of staff, Nadia Younes, whom IntLawGrrls honor as a foremother, and American human rights lawyer Arthur Helton. The annual commemoration was established in paragraph 26 of U.N. General Assembly Resolution A/63/L.39 (2008), entitled "Strengthening of the coordination of emergency humanitarian assistance of the United Nations."

(Prior August 19 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On June 13

On this day in ...
... 1946 (65 years ago today), Nadia Younes was born in Cairo, Egypt. After receiving a degree in English literature from Cairo University she moved to New York, where she became an employee of the United Nations while earning her master's in political science and international relations from New York University. (credit for 1998 U.N. portrait of Younes by John Isaac) In addition to working at the U.N. Secretariat -- including service as the U.N. chief protocol officer during the milestone 2000 meeting of world leaders -- she would lead the U.N. public information office in Rome, then the external relations office of the World Health Organization in Geneva. In 2003 she moved to Baghdad to become chief of staff for the top U.N. official in that wartorn city, Sergio Vieira de Mello. De Mello and Younes, an IntLawGrrls foremother, were among the nearly 2 dozen persons killed in the August 2003 bombing of the U.N. mission in Iraq. A memorial website in Younes' honor is here.

(Prior June 13 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

Welcoming IntLawGrrl Karima Bennoune

It's IntLawGrrls' great honor to welcome our newest member, Karima Bennoune.

Professor of Law and Arthur L. Dickson Scholar at Rutgers School of Law, Newark, New Jersey, Karima (left; photo credit) is currently a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, from which she earned, simultaneously, her J.D. cum laude, an M.A. in Middle Eastern and North African studies, and a Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies. She is a noted expert in human rights, having taken part in human rights field missions in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Pakistan, South Korea, southern Thailand, and Tunisia. In 1995 Karima served as a Center for Women's Global Leadership delegate to the NGO Forum at the 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing; for the next 4 years, she was a London-based legal adviser at Amnesty International. A member of the Board of Trustees of the Center for Constitutional Rights, she also served on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law and the Board of Directors of Amnesty International USA.

Karima is the first Arab-American to win the Derrick Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools. Her publications concentrate on issue's of women's rights, religion and secularism, human rights and humanitarian law, and counterterrorism. In keeping with today's 7th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Karima discusses her latest article, Terror/Torture, in her 1st post below.
Karima dedicates her work on the blog to Nadia Younes (below left), an Egyptian who served as Chief of Staff to Sergio Vieira de Mello in Iraq. Younes, 57, and de Mello, 55, were among the 22 persons killed in the bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad on August 19, 2003. Before her secondment to Baghdad, Younes had served in the U.N. Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and as Executive Director for External Relations and Governing Bodies at the World Health Organization. Today Younes joins other IntLawGrrls transnational foremothers in the list just below our "visiting from..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

The write women

Monday morning tip:
The weekly go-to site for a roundup of interesting books reviewed in Sunday's papers is Mary Dudziak's Legal History Blog. Featured there this past week, 2 new books by women scholars now on our gotta-read list:
► Melissa Nobles (right), The Politics of Official Apologies, a comparative study of the utility, or not, of apologies for state misconduct, in United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Links to review here.
► Samantha Power (left), Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, a biography of the U.N. diplomat and former High Commissioner for Human Right skilled in the suicide bombing of U.N. headquarters in Iraq. Links to reviews here.
Also of note:
Last week's Washington Post profile of historian and newly installed Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust (right), an interview prompted by the recent release of her latest book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.

On August 19, ...

... 2003, explosion of a truck bomb just outside the United Nations' headquarters in Baghdad resulted in the deaths of nearly 2 dozen persons, among them Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N.'s top envoy there and formerly the High Commissioner for Human Rights; American human rights lawyer Arthur Helton. The blast prompted the withdrawal of U.N. workers from Iraq, where a U.S.-coalition had invaded in March. The United Nations did not return until 2004. (photo of bombed headquarters courtesy of U.N. archive)
... 1883, Coco Chanel, as the woman given the birthname Gabrielle "was known the world over," was born. By the time of her death 87 years later at the Ritz hotel in Paris, she'd become "one of the greatest couturiers of the 20th century" and purveyor of the still-bestselling fragrance, No. 5. Describing her as "shrewd, chic and on the cutting edge," a Time profile contended that although Chanel did not consider herself a feminist, she aided "the liberation of women" by promoting easier-to-wear attire.