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Ambassador
Endorses Operation Kosovo
For more information, please contact:
Gwen Osborne, Director of Public Affairs, (312) 906-5251
Susan O'Brien, Ass't. Dean for Public Affairs, (312) 906-5250
Albanian Ambassador
Endorses Chicago-Kent's "Operation Kosovo"
CHICAGO-July
6, 1998-Petrit Bushati, Albanian ambassador to the
United States, today endorsed "Operation Kosovo," a
new project of Illinois Institute of Technology's Chicago-Kent
College of Law. Operation Kosovo uses the Internet as a channel
for lawyers and law students in Chicago and Washington, D.C. to
advise refugees from Kosovo on their rights under international
refugee law.
Ambassador
Bushati's endorsement came in a meeting today with Charles S.
Rudnick, Chicago-Kent's assistant dean for international law and
policy development, and Stuart P. Ingis and John Scheib, two Washington-area
lawyers affiliated with Operation Kosovo. Dean Rudnick and two
IIT students will go to Albania next month to determine what types
of technology will be effective in linking the refugee camps and
refugee organizations to the Internet.
According
to Dean Rudnick, "The ambassador applauded our efforts and
told us that there is an urgent need for the refugees -- and for
the Albanian government -- to understand more clearly their obligations
and rights under international refugee and asylum law. We are
glad to be fulfilling that need."
Operation
Kosovo does not take a position on the politics of the Kosovo
crisis but simply seeks to provide legal advice to the refugees
who have lost their homes. Operation Kosovo is organized in part
through an Interprofessional Projects Program (IPRO), a unique
course at IIT that permits engineering students and law students
to work together on real-world projects. The new initiative in
Kosovo evolved from "Project Bosnia," which enabled
IIT law and engineering students in March of this year to connect
independent media in Serb areas of Bosnia through the Internet.
Henry
H. Perritt, Jr., Dean of Chicago-Kent College of Law and a vice
president of Illinois Institute of Technology, explained the genesis
of Operation Kosovo: "Operation Kosovo originated several
weeks ago during a conversation Dean Rudnick and I had with UN
Ambassador-designate Richard Holbrooke. We discussed how our Project
Bosnia experience could be extended to support U.S. and international
policy with respect to the Kosovo crisis."
"I
believe that this new initiative will continue our tradition of
giving law students at Chicago-Kent and undergraduate engineering
students at IIT an opportunity to learn from each other and learn
how to apply their knowledge of technology and law to restore
a rule of law in those parts of the world where it is lacking,"
he said.
The URL for the Operation Kosovo website is http://pbosnia.kentlaw.edu/kosovo
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