Professor Theo van Boven has been awarded the Lisl and Leo Eitinger Prize; the University of Oslo´ Human Rights Prize, for his long, beneficial efforts to eradicate torture, disappearances and other serious violations of human rights. Van Boven has worked for the UN, for the Christian World Council and for numerous non-governmental organisations. (21-JAN-05)
HRH is invited to the award ceremony. The information in this article is drawn from the invitation. It has been translated and edited for republication here.
Theo van Boven is currently Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Maastricht, the Netherlands. Ever since his doctoral dissertation on the emergence of freedom of faith and religion as a human right, he has written and published widely. His most important contribution to human rights, though, has come through his work for various supernational, state and non-governmental bodies.
Sent packing by the Reagan administration
In the 70s, van Boven served as the Netherlands´ envoy to the UN´s Human Rights Commission, where he made such an impact that the Secretary General appointed him as Director for the entire Human Rights Department at the UN HQ Secretariat. van Boven held this position through dramatic years, seen from a human rights perspective, with the gross violations of the military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and other Latin American countries particularly causing concern. He drew upon all his resources to make the UN developbetter mechanisms to react against these violations, and deserves to be credited as the single most important contributor to the creation of the UN´s first special reporting mechanism; the working group on disappearances. For his efforts to achieve this, van Boven was met with significant political resistance both in Latin America and in the US, particularly after Ronald Reagan came to power and immediately changed the carter administration´s far friendlier policy towards Latin America for the worse. The Reagan administration also saw to it that van Boven did not get his contract with the UN renewed.
Still active
van Boven, however, continued working for human rights on other fronts. As a member of the UN´s subcommission for the promotion and protection of human rights, he developed guidelines for rehabilitation and compensation to victims of serious human rights violations. He also participated in the negotiations leading to the International Criminal Court, established in Rome in 1998. Today, van Boven is the UN´s special rapporteur on torture. His task is to uncover, investigate and report to the UN on torture, with a view to develop effective means of reacton against the ones responsible and also guidelines to prevent future occurences of torture. Leo Eitinger, who, together with his wife Lisl, has given name to the University of Oslo´s Human Rights Prize, was one of the very few Norwegian Jews to survive the Holocaust. He went on to become an internationally renowned psychiatrist and human rights defender, all until his death only a few years ago.
