Eric Stover is an internationally recognized researcher who examines the intersection of war, law, and medicine. He is a founding member of the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, which was founded as result of his research on the medical and social consequences of land mines in Cambodia and later received the Nobel Prize in 1997, along with its director Jody Williams. For the past 30 years, he has led forensic investigations of mass graves in Argentina, Guatemala, Honduras, Chile, Brazil, Iraq, El Salvador, Bosnia, Croatia, and Rwanda. In the early 2000s, Stover conducted the first-ever study of human trafficking and forced labor in the United States. In 2006, Stover conducted an assessment in Northern Uganda for the MacArthur Foundation, which led to the establishment of the Pader Girls Academy. The Academy is a secondary school for teenage girls (and their children) who were former child soldiers in the Lord’s Resistance Army and used as sex slaves by commanders. The Academy has housed and educated over 300 young women and their children.

Stover’s publications and photographs have appeared in numerous newspapers and journals, including the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, Smithsonian, Science, Journal of the American Medical Association, Historical Archeology, and International Review of the Red Cross. Stover has published ten books, including Witnesses from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell; The Guantánamo Effect: Exposing the Consequences of U.S. Interrogation and Detention Practices; The Witnesses: War Crimes and the Promise of Justice in The Hague, and Silent Witness: Forensic DNA Analysis in Criminal Investigations and Humanitarian Disasters.  He has appeared in numerous BBC/PBS documentaries, including "El Equipo," “The Search for the Disappeared” and “The Search for Butch and Sundance.” He has also co-produced several PBS documentaries, including “Dead Reckoning: War, Crime, and Justice from WW II to the War on Terror” and “Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten.”

In 2013, Stover received the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s “Faculty Award for Public Service. He is a past Open Society Fellow and former founder and executive director of Physicians for Human Rights. He is currently a member of a task force overseeing the development of a protocol for war crimes investigations in the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Stover is currently co-Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center and Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

The HUMAN RIGHTS CENTER

Out of the shadows of the Holocaust, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights emerged, its first article reads: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and liberty. This principle underlies all that followed. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration, and while the global community has progressed in many areas, new human rights risks emerge constantly.
 
With the Universal Declaration as its charter, The Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley has spent the last 30 years at the forefront of the human rights field, supporting human rights defenders through research, on-the-ground investigation, and training. It is distinguished by its location within one of the world’s premier universities. With multiple collaborations within the university and around the world, the HRC is unique in that it drives institutional and systems-level change using evidence-based methods and innovative approaches. HRC also trains students and advocates to research, investigate, and document human rights violations and turn this information into effective action. It was the first center to use evidence-based data to learn how to rebuild countries after genocide and ethnic cleansing.
 
HRC will celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2024, and will mark that milestone with a year of human rights trainings and events held around the world.