Brown Bag Lunch Series

Speaker: Rita Izsak, UN Independent Expert on Minority Issues

Many human rights violations have a basis in discrimination, racism, and exclusion on the grounds of the ethnic, religious, national, or racial characteristics of the victim group. Rita Izsák, the UN Independent Expert on Minority Issues, will discuss the UN Declaration on the Rights of Minorities, challenges in its implementation, and the most alarming human rights violations committed against minorities today.

Ms. Rita Izsák (Hungary) was appointed as Independent Expert on minority issues by the Human Rights Council and assumed her functions on 1st August 2011. She is the second holder of the mandate of Independent Expert, she is independent from any government or organization and serves in her individual capacity. Rita Izsák holds a Masters in Law diploma from the Péter Pázmány Catholic University, Budapest, Hungary. Inspired by her own experiences of prejudice and discrimination – her father’s family was forcibly moved under post-war population transfers from Czechoslovakia (present day Slovakia) to Hungary due to their Hungarian ethnicity in 1947 and her mother is of Romani origin – she has been working on human and minority rights for a decade. She started her career in the Budapest-based European Roma Rights Center and later became a Consultant with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Open Society Institute, the Roma Education Fund, and the Association for Women’s Rights in Development. She completed field missions in Somaliland/Somalia where she worked with the Somaliland National Youth Organization (seconded by the London-based Progressio) and gave human rights lectures in Hargeisa Law University. Afterwards, she moved to Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, to join the Organisation of Security and Co-operation in Europe as a Human Rights Officer. She was the Chief of Staff of the Social Inclusion State Secretariat of the Hungarian Ministry of Justice and Public Administration and was responsible for several key priorities under Hungary’s EU Presidency, including the establishment of the European Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies. Between 2011 and spring 2013, Ms Izsák was the President and CEO of the Tom Lantos Institute (TLI) based in Budapest, Hungary, a research institute and think-tank with a particular focus on human rights and minority rights.

Brown Bag Lunch Series