Originally published on the CGS blog on June 24, 2009.
On June 24, 2009, the Senate voted to advance Harold Koh‘s nomination for the position of Legal Adviser of the Department of State and move towards a final confirmation of his position. The Dean of Yale Law School and former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor was nominated to be the primary legal counselor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on March 23, 2009 by President Obama..
As the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law and former director of Yale Law School’s Center for International Human Rights, Koh is a prominent advocate of
human rights and authority on international law. He served as a delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission under the Clinton administration and has promoted a theory of “transnational jurisdiction,” which looks to tenets of international law to inform and improve the domestic judicial process. He argues that “concepts like liberty, equality, and privacy are not exclusively American constitutional ideas but, rather, part and parcel of the global human rights movement.”
GlobalSolutions.org supports the decisions of Obama and the Senate in the proposal and advancement of Koh’s nomination and congratulates him on the great honor and exciting opportunity of this position.
