Roosevelt University to Present Oct. 5 Lecture by Acclaimed International Lawyer

Sellers will discuss international criminal and humanitarian laws and matters related to sexual violence and gender, especially during armed conflicts. The 11 a.m. lecture is free and open to the public in Ganz Hall, room 745, at Roosevelt University, 430 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago.

A visiting fellow at Oxford University, Sellers is currently a special advisor for Prosecution Strategies for the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.  She previously was a prosecutor at the Yugoslav Tribunal and co-counsel and a legal strategist at the Rwanda Tribunal, the first international case to hold sexual violence as an act of genocide and rape as a crime against humanity.

During her career, she has testified as an expert witness on sexual violence in several regional human rights courts and trained judges, prosecutors and investigators on the complex aspects of international crimes of sexual violence in countries such as Columbia, Guatemala, Uganda, Nepal, Qatar, Indonesia and Kenya.

Sellers has lectured extensively on humanitarian law and international criminal law at colleges and universities around the world. The Roosevelt lecturer is the author of numerous articles including “Sexual Violence and Rape,” a policy paper that analyzed non-discriminatory principles of human rights law to sex-based international crimes.

She also drafted United Nations resolutions to halt child recruitment and to sanction patterns of maiming, killing and sexual violence perpetrated upon children during armed conflict.

A dual United States/Belgian national, Sellers graduated from the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania and is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate in Law from the City University of New York. She is fluent in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish and served as a story consultant on the PBS series, “Women, War and Peace.”

Sponsored by the Center for New Deal Studies at Roosevelt University, the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Distinguished Lecture Series was inaugurated in 1992.  Previous lecturers have included Ambassador William vanden Heuvel; journalist Cokie Roberts; Surgeon General Regina M. Benjamin, M.D.; Allida Black of the ER Papers Project; and author and historian Studs Terkel.

For further information about the Oct. 5 lecture by Patricia Viseur Sellers, contact Margaret Rung, associate professor of history at Roosevelt University, [email protected].

Source: www.roosevelt.edu