Professor Bennoune gives keynote address at annual seminar in Oslo

Professor Karima Bennoune, the U.N. Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, gave the keynote speech on Dec. 4 at the Council for Religious and Life Stance Communities annual seminar, in Oslo, Norway.

Bennoune addressed the cultural rights approach to the universality of human rights and the close interrelationship between universality and cultural diversity. She also joined Norwegian Minister of Culture Trine Skei Grande and Srirak Plipat, executive director of the artistic-freedom advocacy organization Freemuse, in conversation at the seminar.

Karima Bennoune 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, available in paperback from W.W. Norton & Company. In October 2015, she was appointed UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights.  She was recently presented with the 2016 Rights and Leadership Award by IANGEL, the International Action Network for Gender Equity & Law.