Portal:Genocide/Selected biography/1

Gregory H. Stanton is the founder (1999) and president of Genocide Watch, the founder (1981) and director of the Cambodian Genocide Project, and is the founder (1999) and Chair of the International Campaign to End Genocide. He is the Vice President (2005 - 2007) of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Gregory Stanton comes from the lineage of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women's suffrage activist, and Henry Brewster Stanton, an anti-slavery leader. Actively involved in human rights since the 1960's, when he was a voting rights worker in Mississippi, he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Ivory Coast, and as the Church World Service/CARE Field Director in Cambodia in 1980.

Dr. Stanton served in the State Department (1992-1999), where he drafted the United Nations Security Council resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Burundi Commission of Inquiry, and the Central African Arms Flow Commission. He also drafted the U.N. Peacekeeping Operations resolutions that helped bring about an end to the Mozambique civil war. In 1994, Stanton won the American Foreign Service Association's prestigious W. Averell Harriman award for "extraordinary contributions to the practice of diplomacy exemplifying intellectual courage," based on his dissent from U.S. policy on the Rwandan genocide. He wrote the State Department options paper on ways to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice in Cambodia.

Since leaving the State Department in 1999 to found Genocide Watch, Stanton has been deeply involved in the U.N. - Cambodian government negotiations that have brought about creation of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, for which he has drafted internal rules of procedure and evidence. From 1999 - 2000, he also served as Co-Chair of the Washington Working Group for the International Criminal Court.