David Scheffer
CIR News:
The Santa Fe Council on International Relations (CIR) has announced that the former U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues (1997-2001) David Scheffer will speak 5-7 p.m., Feb. 20 at Hotel Santa Fe, 1501 Paseo de Peralta in Santa Fe.
Ambassador Scheffer will discuss his latest book, The Sit Room: In the Theater of War and Peace (Oxford 2019), focusing on foreign policy under the Trump Administration. Generously supported by the Quezada Jacobs Family Agency: Allstate Insurance.
The Sit Room is a compelling story about the day by day decision-making that transpired in the Situation Room of the White House during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s, when Scheffer was on the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council and working as Senior Adviser and Counsel to then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Dr. Madeleine Albright.
The book reveals three years of policy wrangling, mistakes, progress, tragedy, and finally a peace deal at Dayton in November 1995. With declassified documents and notes 25 years later, Scheffer has written the most probing narrative of secret decision-making in the famous Situation Room ever published. He compares that process to decision-making under the Trump Administration and the tumultuous reality of American foreign policy today.
Ambassador Scheffer is the Mayer Brown/Robert A. Helman Professor of Law at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in Chicago. His long career spans private practice, staff positions on Capitol Hill, think tanks, government and U.N. service, NGOs, and academia.
He was the first U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues (1997-2001) and led the U.S. delegation in the U.N. talks establishing the International Criminal Court. He signed the Rome Statute of the ICC on behalf of the United States on Dec. 31, 2000. He negotiated the creation of five war crimes tribunals during the 1990s and was on the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council from 1993 to 1997. Ambassador Scheffer was the U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Expert on U.N. Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials (2012-2018).
Ambassador Scheffer authored the award-winning All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton, 2012). He received the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin in 2013 and the Champion of Justice Award of the Center for Justice and Accountability in 2018.
He was educated at Harvard College, Oxford University (where he was a Knox Fellow) and Georgetown University Law Center, and is a member of the New York and District of Columbia Bars. He publishes and speaks widely on foreign policy and international law issues. Ambassador Scheffer was born and raised in Oklahoma and has a residence in Santa Fe.
Cost of admission is $12 for nonmembers and $10 for CIR members (in advance) and $12/15 at the door (cash bar 5-5:30 p.m., talk begins at 5:30 p.m.). For more information on registering, visit www.sfcir.org or call 505.982.4931.