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Funding provided by:

Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars

In partnership with:
John F. Kennedy Library Foundation
With support from: Lowell Institute
Date and time
Tuesday, December 9, 2003

John Shattuck, former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, and current CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, discusses his new book, Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America's Response, with Pulitzer-prize winning author Samantha Power. As the chief human rights official of the Clinton administration, John Shattuck faced many challenges including genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia, murder and atrocities in Haiti, repression in China, brutal ethnic wars, and failed states in other parts of the world. Shattuck describes what was learned as he and other human rights hawks worked to change the Clinton administration's human rights policy from one of disengagement to one focused on saving lives and bringing war criminals to justice. Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America's Response records Shattuck's frustrations and disappointments, as well as the successes achieved in moving human rights to the center of US foreign policy.

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Samantha Power
**Samantha Power** is an Irish-American academic, author and diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. Power began her career by covering the Yugoslav Wars as a journalist. From 1998 to 2002, she served as the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she later became the first Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy. She was a senior adviser to Senator Barack Obama until March 2008, when she resigned from his presidential campaign after apologizing for referring to then-Senator Hillary Clinton as "a monster."
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John Shattuck
JOHN SHATTUCK, an international legal scholar and human rights leader, is currently Professor of Practice in Diplomacy at Tufts after a long and distinguished career in academia and government. In the early post-Cold War years, he was responsible for coordinating and implementing U.S. efforts to promote human rights, democracy and international labor rights. The first U.S. official to reach and interview survivors of the genocide at Srebrenica, he helped negotiate the Dayton peace agreement that ended the war in Bosnia and was instrumental in the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. He also served President Clinton as U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic from 1998-2000.
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