AAAS Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program

Torture: Science & the Law
A Public Discussion sponsored by AAAS
Biographies

Robert K. Goldman, J.D., is a law professor at the Washington College of Law at American University. He is an expert on the law of armed conflict and is the co-director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the Washington College of Law and former president and vice president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. He will discuss the legal definition of torture.

Martha K. Huggins, Ph.D., is Charles A and Leo F Favrot Professor of Human Relations at Tulane University, where she is tenured professor in the Department of Sociology and Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies. A specialist on on-duty and extra-legal police violence, particularly in Brazil, Huggins has published five scholarly books and numerous academic publications on these topics. Two of Huggins' books, Political Policing: The United States and Latin America (Duke, 1998) and Violence Workers: Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities (U. Of California Press, 2002, with P. Zimbardo and Mika Haritos-Fatouros), have each been awarded two scholarly prizes. As a sociologist, Huggins areas are crime and social control, particularly in Latin America, with a specific focus on Brazil--where Huggins has worked in the field for almost 30 years. Huggins is recognized for her work on state-sponsored torture, death squads, and other forms of on- and off-duty violence. Huggins' work in criminology embraces these themes especially with reference to police institutions. She will discuss some of her research and its implication for other contexts.

Allen S. Keller, M.D., has served as the Program Director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture since it began in 1995. Dr. Keller is an Attending Physician in the Bellevue Hospital Primary Care Medical Clinic and an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine in the Department of Medicine at NYU School of Medicine. Dr. Keller is on the International Advisory Board of Physicians for Human Rights and has been evaluating survivors of torture through PHR's asylum network since 1990. Dr. Keller has written extensively on a number of health and human rights issues, including access to health care for prisoners, the medical and social consequences of land mines, and human rights education for health professionals. In 1993, Dr. Keller developed a United Nations funded program to teach human rights to Cambodian heath professionals. In 1996, Dr. Keller led a PHR fact finding mission to Dharamsala, India to interview Tibetan refugees and documented the continued use of torture by Chinese authorities in Tibet. He will discuss the research and practice of care for torture survivors.

Meredith Larson, MPH, is the Campaigns Associate for Amnesty International USA and was actively involved in AI's recent international campaign to stop torture. She has been active in work against torture for several years, has served on the Board of Directors of the torture treatment center Survivors International, and currently serves on the selection committee for the Barbara Chester Award, an international award for an outstanding practitioner in the torture rehabilitation field. She has also written and published about the torture treatment work in the US and Canada. Ms. Larson, who is a survivor of political violence in Guatemala, is also affiliated with two survivor organizations--the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International and Coalition Missing, a project of the Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA. She will discuss the current prevalence of torture around the world.