Forensic Medicine is a core discipline in the detection and recording of gross abuses of human rights especially genocide, murder and torture.  The beginning of this contribution dates from the doctor's trial at Nuremburg, fittingly denoted Trial Number 1.  This trial dealt with the ghastly program of human experimentation run by the SS.  The late Professor Keith Mant, then the British Army Pathologist, undertook much of the investigation of this program for the trial.  It was not until the early 1980's that the discipline of forensic medicine was again used to investigate gross human rights abuses.  Forensic pathologists, forensic anthropologists and others under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science went to Argentina in 1984-85 to assist with the exhumation and identification of many of those who disappeared under the military junta between 1976 and 1983.  Numerous other expeditions to countries in South America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East followed, many of them under the auspices of the US based Physicians for Human Rights.  With the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and later the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the world's forensic community has been hard at work investigating, collecting and documenting material which may be used at the trials of those accused of crimes against humanity.  This lecture will illustrate the history of the contribution of forensic medicine in this area, using material from the former Yugoslavia and other parts of the world.

Date: October 11, 2001 (Thursday)
Time: 6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.
Venue: 14/F, Senior Common Room, K.K. Leung Bldg., The University of Hong Kong

Prof. Cordner is Director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine in Melbourne and is the Professor of Forensic Pathology at Monash University.  He is also the current President of the Indo-Pacific Association of Medicine Law and Science (INPALMS). He and staff from his Institute are extremely active in human rights work throughout the world. He has also hosted and trained many forensic staff from developing countries at his institute.