DIAS Clarence

inhumanwrongs@yahoo.com

Dr. Clarence J. Dias is the President of the International Center for Law in Development, a Third World NGO concerned about human rights in the development process. Dr. Clarence J. Dias holds a PhD Degree in law from Bombay University and a S.J.D degree from Cornell Law School. He has taught at the Boston College of Law and at the Department of Law of the University of Bombay. He has practiced law before the High Court of Bombay and has considerable public interest experience. He has published extensively and his books include: Industrial Hazards in a Transnational World; Legal Professions inn the Third World; The International Context of Rural Poverty in the Third World; and The Universal Decleration of Human Rights: Fifty Years and Beyond.

Dr. Clarence J. Dias assisted the drafting group that produced the 1986 UN Declaration on the Right to Development and was a consultant at the Global Consultation on the Right to Development, convened by the UN Human Rights Centre in 1989. He served as consultant to various UN agencies including UNDP, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNICEF and ILO and to various bilateral development agencies including those of Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands, Australia and the United Kingdom.

He was a resource person at the informal experts workshop on Human Rights in Development Assistance, convened by the Development Advisory Committee of OECD in Paris in 1996 and was Chair of the Meeting of Experts on Economic Social and Cultural Rights, convened by the UN Human Rights Centre. For a six-year period (1996 to 2001) Dr. Clarence J. Dias was the UN expert from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights at the annual Asia-Pacific Intergovernmental Workshop on Regional Human Rights Arrangements. He was the primary author of UNDP's policy on Integrating Human Rights with Sustainable Human Development (adopted in 1997) and thereafter, undertook responsibility for the human rights component in five UNDP regional workshops for Resident Representatives on the human rights policy of UNDP. He has organized UNDP workshops for the Parliaments of Swaziland and of Cambodia.