Mary Robinson: One of the World's Leading Advocates on Human Rights
VANCOUVER - Former President of Ireland (1990-1997) and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997- 2002) Mary Robinson was presented with the Simon Fraser University 2005 Jack P. Blaney Award for Dialogue at the Four Seasons Hotel on April 8.
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| MARY ROBINSON |
Honoured throughout the world for her vision and leadership, Mary Robinson is now the Executive Director of the Ethical Globalization Initiative based in New York City. The project is supported by a partnership of the Aspen Institute, State of the World Forum and the Swiss based International Council on Human Rights Policy.
Its goal is to bring the norms and standards of human rights into the globalization process and to support capacity building in good governance in developing countries, with an initial focus on Africa.
In her address on April 7 at Simon Fraser University, Robinson spoke on the power of dialogue to bridge the divide between the world's powerful and wealthy nations and the almost three billion people who struggle to survive on less than $2 a day.
Robinson was the first woman elected President of Ireland and has spent most of her life as a human rights advocate. Born Mary Bourke in Ballina, County Mayo (1944), the daughter of two physicians, she was educated at the University of Dublin (Trinity College), King's Inns Dublin and Harvard Law School to which she won a fellowship in 1967.
As an academic (Trinity College Law Faculty 1968-90), legislator (Senator 1969-89) and barrister (1967-90) Senior Counsel (1980), English Bar (1973), she has always sought to use law as an instrument for social change, arguing landmark cases before the European Court of Human Rights as well as in the Irish courts and the European Court in Luxemburg.
A committed European, she also served on the International Commission of Jurists, the Advisory Committee of Interrights, and on expert European Community and Irish parliamentary committees.
In 1970, she married Nicholas Robinson, lawyer, conservationist, and an authority on Eighteenth-Century caricature. They have a daughter and two sons. In 1988 Robinson and her husband founded the Irish Centre for European Law at the Trinity College. Ten years later she was elected Chancellor of the University.
The recipient of numerous honors and awards throughout the world, Robinson is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and the American Philosophical Society and, since 2002, has been Honorary President of Oxfam International. A founding member of the Council of Women World Leaders, she serves on many boards including the Vaccine Fund, and chairs the Irish Chamber Orchestra.
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[For full coverage of Mary Robinson’s Vancouver visit, see the upcoming May issue of The Celtic Connection.]
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