With talks at U.N. and in England, Spain and Malaysia, Professor Bennoune has busy March

On March 1, Professor Karima Bennoune, United Nations Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, delivered her latest report to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva. Her report addressed the 10th anniversary of the U.N. cultural rights mandate.

The report provided an overview of the work of the mandate since its creation, and suggested strategies for advancing cultural rights during the next decade.

Bennoune and other U.N. human rights experts also issued a call, on International Women’s Day (March 8), for the international community to “break the taboo around menstrual health and take concrete action to ensure that discriminatory mindsets are changed, and women’s and girls’ menstrual health protected.” Bennoune also did a briefing on women’s cultural rights for the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women.

Dana Talant ’19 and LL.M. student Lorena Zenteno accompanied Bennoune to Geneva.

Bennoune then traveled to England to deliver the keynote address at a conference on cultural heritage protection in armed conflict at Newcastle University. From there, she went to Barcelona to speak at an event for International Women’s Day about the impact of fundamentalism and extremism on women’s human rights.

Finally, Bennoune traveled to Malaysia to deliver the keynote address at the 8th World Summit on Arts and Culture in Kuala Lumpur.

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, now 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.