University of North Dakota Law Professor Gregory S. Gordon, a highly-sought expert on war crimes and international human rights law, will be featured, along with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and famed Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel, on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Web site, beginning, Thursday, May 21, on a special podcast for the "Voices on Antisemitism" series.

Gordon, an assistant professor of law at UND, helped to prosecute the landmark "media" cases in Rwanda, as a legal officer and deputy team leader in the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Gordon and his colleagues were able to prove that hate speech, broadcast over the radio and printed in newspapers, was directly linked to the genocide of the Tutsi people. The "media" cases were the first international post-Nuremberg prosecutions of radio and print media executives for incitement to genocide.

For this work on the cases, Gordon received a commendation from former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno for "service to the United States and international justice." Gordon believes that the lessons learned in Rwanda could be applied today, in Iran and elsewhere, to prevent these incitement tactics from taking hold.

Gordon's podcast will add to the series' already amazing collection of voices, elaborating broad-ranging perspectives about modern antisemitism and hatred. Some of the other podcasts include accounts by Harvard Professor of Law Alan Dershowitz, Princeton Professor of Religion Cornel West and Hollywood actor Daniel Craig.

The series can be accessed on the internet at:

http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/antisemitism/voices/.

The series is made possible by generous support from the Oliver and Elizabeth Stanton Foundation.

Gregory S. Gordon

At UND, in addition to teaching human rights and international law, Gordon offers classes in criminal law and criminal procedure. He's also director of the University's Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies (CHRGS). His efforts, as CHRGS Director, have led to several recent visits to UND by heroes and survivors of horrific periods in history, including Gunnar Sonsteby, leader of the Norwegian resistance against Nazism during World War II and arrester of the infamous Vidkun Quisling; Dr. Fred Lyon, a retired Minneapolis physician and native of Berlin, Germany, where he was persecuted by Nazis and witnessed first-hand the terror of the Kristallnacht Pogrom (Night of Broken Glass); and Martin Weiss, a Nazi death-camp survivor.  CHRGS also brought "Camp Darfur" to campus -- an interactive simulation of a Darfuri refugee camp that brings to life the voices of genocide survivors.

The UND Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies holds the world's first computer database of Nuremberg War Crimes archives related to the Nazi occupation of Norway. The center also is also involved in a project to compile electronic documentation of "Red Terror" human rights crimes committed in Ethiopia during the notorious "Derg" regime.

Gordon earned his bachelor's degree (summa cum laude) and Juris Doctor at the University of California at Berkeley. Next, he served as law clerk to U. S. District Court Judge Martin Pence, D-Hawaii, and later, as a litigator in San Francisco. Following his service on the Rwanda "media" cases, he served in the U.S. Department of Justice, dealing with white-collar tax crimes and helping to bring down narcotics trafficking rings. The DOJ also sent Gordon to Sierra Leone, Africa to conduct a post-civil war justice assessment for the department's Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development, Assistance, and Training.

In 2003, he joined the DOJ Criminal Division's Office of Special Investigations, where he helped investigate and prosecute Nazi war criminals and modern human rights violators.

Gordon has been featured on C-SPAN, Voice of America, NPR, BBC and Radio France Internationale as an expert on war crimes prosecution and has lectured on that subject at the U.S. Army J.A.G. School, the Harry S. Truman Presidential Museum and Library and to members of the British and Canadian Parliaments.  He has been honored to share the dais at conferences with former U.N. Ambassadors Andrew Young and Richard Holbrooke as well as former Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues David Scheffer.

On behalf of the Ethiopian government, he has trained high-level federal prosecutors in the capital city of Addis Ababa. His scholarship on international criminal law has been published in leading international journals, such as the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, and the Virginia Journal of International Law. He also has presented his work at institutions such as Yale University, Georgetown University Law Center and Emory University.

--30--