Higginbotham Human Rights Lecture: "Building a Black Haiti More Justly"

Mario Joseph, Haiti’s most prominen thuman rights lawyer, has led the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) in Port-au-Prince, Haiti since 1996 where he and the organization represent political prisoners and victims of political violence. Mr. Joseph spearheaded the prosecution of the Raboteau Massacre trial in 2000, one of the most significant human rights cases in the Western Hemisphere. He has also testified as an expert on Haitian criminal procedure before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and in U.S. courts, and served on the Haitian government’s Law Reform Commission. Under Joseph’s leadership, the BAI has become a model for training lawyers to represent the poor in human rights cases. Since 2005, he has been a member of the governing Bureau of the International Association of Democratic Jurists.