What are We Waiting For? Serving Humanity in a World of Extremes – A Talk by Dr. Payam Akhavan

In this talk titled ‘What are We Waiting For? Serving Humanity in a World of Extremes’, International Law Professor and former United Nations prosecutor, Dr. Payam Akhavan, talks about his personal experience as a refugee and as a Human Rights lawyer, and he shares how the execution of a young Baha’i woman in Iran would change the course of his life forever.

Payam Akhavan PhD (Harvard) is a Professor of International Law at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is a Member of the International Court of Arbitration and a former UN prosecutor at The Hague. His prior academic appointments were at Yale, Oxford, Paris, and Florence, and he has served with the United Nations in Bosnia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and other conflict zones. He is a founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, and he has also produced and contributed to several notable documentary films on Human Rights. His global career has been featured in the New York Times, BBC World’s HardTalk, Maclean’s magazine, Toronto Star, and Brazil’s TV Globo. In 2005, he was selected by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader. In October 2017, he delivered the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Massey Lectures. The companion book, a memoir entitled ‘In Search of a Better World: A Human Rights Odyssey‘, became the #1 bestseller (non-fiction) in Canada.

This talk was given at the Grand Canyon Baha’i Conference, 25 December 2017.

You can also watch the talk here on Baha’i Blog’s YouTube channel: What are We Waiting For? Serving Humanity in a World of Extremes – A Talk by Dr. Payam Akhavan

For more Baha’i-inspired talks, you can visit Baha’i Blog’s Soundcloud page: soundcloud.com/bahai-blog/sets/bahai-talks, or Baha’i Blog’s YouTube channel: http://bit.ly/2ia1Yxp.

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Naysan Naraqi

Naysan is passionate about using the arts and media to explore the teachings of the Baha’i Faith. Back in 2011, Naysan started up the Baha’i Blog project, channeling his experiences in both media and technology companies to help create a hub for Baha’i-inspired content online.