Expertise
Over several decades of high level involvement in the field of international human rights, David Hawk has acquired expertise in the documentation and analysis of worst case violations, the UN human rights system, human rights provisions in conflict resolution, non-governmental human rights advocacy, human rights organization and agency management, and human rights education and training. David Hawk is recognized as a leading expert on the human rights situation in a number of countries, most particularly Cambodia and North Korea.
Education
Hawk was educated at Cornell University. He studied social ethics at Union Theological Seminary (at Columbia University) and international affairs at Oxford University. He was briefly an adjunct lecturer at Hunter College of the City University of New York and has had long affiliation with the Columbia University Center for the Study of Human Rights and the University Seminar on Human Rights at Columbia, and was a Fellow in International Law and Justice at Brandeis.
Background
While in college and graduate school in the 1960s Hawk began human rights work in voter registration, community organizing and civil rights efforts in Mississippi and Georgia. His interest in East Asia also began with the escalation of the war in Vietnam while he was in college and graduate school. Hawk was the Executive Director of Amnesty International, USA during its formative stage in the mid-1970s. He also directed the UN human rights office, during the mid-1990s when it was the largest field operation of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. In the early 1980s Hawk did path-breaking original photographic and archival documentation of the human rights atrocities in Cambodia under Khmer Rouge rule, and researched and authored the first systematic and comprehensive documentation and analysis of the political prison camp system in North Korea. He has served on the Board of Directors of AIUSA and Human Rights Watch/Asia.
Recent Publications
