About:

The Department of Government and Politics, College Park Scholars, International Studies and the Baha’i Chair for World Peace Present a Lecture

Speaker:

YOUK CHHANG

Executive Director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), founder of Sleuk Rith Institute (a memorial dedicated to the survivors of the genocide)

Youk Chhang is the Executive Director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), founder of Sleuk Rith Institute (a memorial dedicated to the survivors of the genocide) and a survivor of the Khmer Rouge’s “killing fields. Born and raised in Phnom Penh, from the age of 15, he suffered years of torture and imprisonment under the Khmer Rouge.

Chhang has written extensively and produced films on the crimes and victims of the Khmer Rouge; A River Changes Course won the Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for documentaries in 2013. He is the Senior Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Genocide, Conflict Resolution, and Human Rights at Rutgers University-Newark. He was a founding member of the Institute for International Criminal Investigations in The Hague in 2003. In 2000, he received the Truman-Reagan Freedom Award from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, DC. Chhang was named one of TIME magazine’s “60 Asian heroes” in 2006 and one of the “Time 100” most influential people in the world in 2007 for his stand against human rights violations and crimes against humanity. He and the documentation center are the recipients of the 2017 Judith Lee Stronach Human Rights Award from the Center for Justice and Accountability.