15 July 2005

(Iranian American Goli Ameri to discuss human rights, U.N. commission)

Goli Ameri, an Iranian American businesswoman and a member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), will be online to answer questions about human rights issues during a moderated Internet chat July 20.

Ameri will discuss her experience as one of the three private-sector U.S. delegates to the 61st session of the UNCHR, held in Geneva from March 14 to April 22, as well as her personal background with human rights issues.

The moderated Internet chat takes place at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) on Wednesday, July 20.  To participate, you must register by sending an e-mail to iipchat@state.gov before the beginning of the chat so that login information can be sent to you.  You are neither required nor encouraged to provide any personal information.

You can also submit questions in advance to iipchat@state.gov.

After completing her work as a delegate to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, Ameri wrote an editorial for the May 20 issue of the Oregonian newspaper.  She pointed out that “more than 30 percent of the commission membership is made up of the worst human-rights abusers -- nations such as China, Cuba, Sudan and Zimbabwe.”

“I learned during six weeks in Geneva that those proposing U.N. reform are not against the United Nations. In fact, if anything, they hearken to what the United Nations was meant to do,” she wrote.

Ameri is the founder and president of eTiniium, a consulting and market research firm specializing in the telecommunications industry.  She was a Republican candidate for the U.S. Congress from Oregon in 2004.

As a supporter of the Iran Democracy Project at Hoover Institution and the Democracy and the Rule of Law project at the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, Ameri has great interest in worldwide democratic movements, in particular the conditions and prospects for democracy in Iran.