Havel at Columbia
Lecture
Jiří Dienstbier: Democracy Seventeen Years After the Fall of the Iron Curtain
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Harriman Institute
Dec 7 6:00pm to 8:00pm Harison Room, on the 2nd Floor of Faculty House |
Jiří Dienstbier was one of the first 250 signatories of Charter 77, and served as one of its spokespeople in 1979 and 1985. He also served as editor of the underground newspaper Lidové noviny in the final years of communist Czechoslovakia and, after acting as the spokesperson of the Coordinating Center of Civic Forum during Czechoslovakias "Velvet Revolution," became the states first post-communist foreign minister in 1989. After leaving office in 1992, he was Ambassador-at-large and President Václav Havel's personal representative to the Group of Sixteen Heads of State for Multilateral Cooperation and Reform of the United Nations from 1994 to 2000. Dienstbier was also active as the UNs Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1998-2001.
For more information about Czech events at Columbia, please see: http://sipa.columbia.edu/regional/ECE/Czech.html