Professor Bennoune Pays Tribute to Slain French Teacher

Professor Karima Bennoune, U.N. Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, paid tribute to French schoolteacher Samuel Paty on the first anniversary of his death.

Paty was killed on Oct. 16, 2020, following a social media campaign that misrepresented his attempts to teach freedom of expression using cartoons.

“His killing was an attack on cultural rights, freedom of expression, academic freedom, freedom of religion or belief – and of course his right to life,” Bennoune and U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief Ahmed Shaheed said in a joint statement included in a press release from the U.N. Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner. Read the release.

Karima Bennoune, Homer G. Angelo and Ann Berryhill Chair and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, is an author, lecturer, teacher, and international law scholar as well as the first Arab American to be honored with the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools. In 2014, she was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism (W.W. Norton & Company). In October 2015, she was appointed U.N. Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights.  She received the 2016 Rights and Leadership Award from IANGEL, the International Action Network for Gender Equity & Law.

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