CID Speaker Series: The Humanitarian Crisis in Venezuela - A Conversation with José Miguel Vivanco

Date: 

Wednesday, September 26, 2018, 1:15pm to 2:30pm

Location: 

Allison Dining Room (ADR) - Taubman, 5th Floor

JMVSpeaker: José Miguel Vivanco, Executive Director of Americas division, Human Rights Watch

About the talk: The current exodus of Venezuelans has generated the largest migration crisis of its kind in recent Latin American history, as Human Rights Watch has pointed out in its most recent report. More than 2.3 million Venezuelans have left their country since 2014, according to the United Nations, and many others have left whose cases have not been registered by authorities. Venezuelans are fleeing their country for multiple reasons, which includes: Severe shortages of medicine, medical supplies, and food; extremely high rates of violent crime; hyperinflation; and thousands of arbitrary arrests, torture and other abuses against detainees. The director of Human Rights Watch's Americas division, Jose Miguel Vivanco, will talk about this exodus, its causes and consequences, and the Need for a Regional Response to face the crisis.

About the speaker: José Miguel Vivanco, director of Human Rights Watch's Americas division, is a general expert on Latin America. Before joining Human Rights Watch, Vivanco worked as an attorney for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights at the Organization of American States (OAS).  In 1990, he founded the Center for Justice and International Law, an NGO that files complaints before international human rights bodies. Vivanco has also been an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center and the School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University. He has published articles in leading American and Latin American newspapers and is interviewed regularly for television news. A Chilean, Vivanco studied law at the University of Chile and Salamanca Law School in Spain and holds an LL.M. from Harvard Law School.

This event is being co-sponsored by:

carr center