Health and Safety Panel

Maneesha Deckha is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria. Her research and teaching interests include animal law, feminist analysis of law, law and culture, health law and bioethics. Her work has been published in Canada and internationally in legal and interdisciplinary venues including the McGill Law Journal, Harvard Journal of Gender and Law, Ethics & The Environment, Hypatia, and Sexualities. She has also contributed to several anthologies relating to feminism, cultural pluralism and health law and policy, and is the recipient of grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program. In 2008, Deckha held the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Law & Society at New York University. Kathleen Graham is an independent contractor working in international/women’s human rights and gender-based economic development. She has worked primarily in countries with developing or transitional economies, for international agencies and non-profit organizations, to facilitate increased access, particularly for women, to material resources and political and social power. She espouses a rights-based approach to development, using the international human rights treaties and covenants to advocate for just economic allocations and the legal structures necessary to support them. Much of her work in the last decade has focused on economic advocacy strategies for the rural poor in Tajikistan, as well as assignments in Afghanistan and Central and Eastern Europe. She has also consulted and written for john powell’s Institute on Race and Poverty. Prior to 1995 Ms. Graham practiced law for more than 20 years, specializing in employment and class action discrimination litigation. She has been an Adjunct Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School (Gender-Based Discrimination) and the Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at Hamline University School of Law. She lectured and taught extensively in the areas of discrimination, civil rights, employment law, trial practice and federal procedure while practicing law in the United States. Berta Esperanza Hernández-Truyol is the Levin, Mabie & Levin Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law and an affiliate professor at the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies and the Center for Latin American Studies. She teaches international law, international human rights, and specialized, interdisciplinary, graduate seminars on human rights. She utilizes an interdisciplinary and international framework to promote human well-being around the globe. She is engaged in initiatives that seek to develop, expand and transform the human rights discourse with a focus on issues of gender, race, ethnicity, culture, sexuality, language, and other vulnerabilities as well as their interconnections. Professor Hernández-Truyol has urged the use of human rights norms in domestic fora in order to promote the rights of women and racial/ethnic/linguistic/sexual minorities and other vulnerable populations. Her publications include: JUst Trade: A New Covenant Linking Trade and Human Rights (co-authored with Stephen J. Powell); Moral Imperialism: A Critical Anthology; and close to 100 articles and chapters. Professor Hernández-Truyol is also a founding member of LatCrit, Inc., a not-for-profit corporation with consultative status in the United Nations Economic and Social Council. LatCrit aims to develop a critical, international, and interdisciplinary discourse on law and policy towards Latinas/os and other marginalized or disempowered populations, and to foster the development of an anti-subordination, coalitional theory and practice