WOLA: Advocacy for Human Rights in the Americas
15 Sep 2017 | WOLA Statement

WOLA Congratulates Duke University for its Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America

WOLA (the Washington Office on Latin America) congratulates Duke University for announcing its Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. This award has evolved out of the WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award, which honored the best current fiction and nonfiction books published in English on human rights, democracy, and social justice in contemporary Latin America.

The WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award was first awarded in 2008, and has honored authors across the Americas for their important contributions to research on Latin America and their enrichment of the general public’s understanding of the region. The final WOLA-Duke Book Award recipient, in 2016, was Chad Broughton’s Boom, Bust, Exodus: The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities.

I know I speak for the entire WOLA family in our desire to ensure that the Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America is highly successful and builds on the success of its predecessor,” said WOLA Executive Director Matt Clausen.

The new award is named after Juan E. Méndez, the former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and current Professor of Human Rights Law at American University. Mendéz has dedicated his career to the defense of human rights and has a long and distinguished history of advocacy throughout the Americas.

We congratulate Duke on their successful effort to take the WOLA-Duke Book Award to its next stage of evolution. Juan is a stellar embodiment of what the Award stands for, and is an excellent choice as an ambassador moving forward,” Clausen added.

Duke University will begin accepting submissions for the 2017 Juan E. Méndez Book Award on September 1. For more information, please click here.