Areas of Interest: Human rights, UN and OAS human rights mechanisms, democratic transition and consolidation in Latin America, violence, authoritarian legacies, un-civil society.
Paolo Pinheiro is adjunct professor of international studies at the Institute.
Previously, Pinheiro was professor of political science at the University of São Paulo, USP, in Brazil and at the State University of Campinas, UNICAMP. He has been a Guest Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center and a Guggenheim Fellow. He has also taught at Columbia and Notre Dame in the US, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, EHESS, at the Maison des Sciences de l´Homme in Paris, and at Oxford University in the UK.
He has published many articles, essays, and books on social history, democracy, violence, and human rights. Among them, he has published, with co-editors Ignacy Sachs and Jorge Wilheim, Brazil: A Century of Change (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
In 2003 Pinheiro was appointed by the UN Secretary-General as independent expert, to prepare an in-depth study on violence against children. He presented the World Report on Violence against Children in 2006 and has since followed up the recommendations of the report with work that was profiled in 2009 in the Lancet medical journal.
Pinheiro held the position of UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Burundi from 1995 to 1998 and in Myanmar from 2000 to 2008. He was also a member of the former UN Sub-Commission for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights. There, in 2006, he presented the United Nations Principles on Housing and Property Restitutions for Displaced Persons (the"Pinheiro Principles"), which were followed in 2007 by the interagency Handbook on Housing and Property Restitution for Refugees and Displaced Persons: Implementing the 'Pinheiro Principles.'
Pinheiro served as Brazil's secretary of state for human rights under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and as rapporteur of the Brazilian government's National Human Rights Plans of 1996 and 2002.
He holds an BA in Law from the Catholic University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil a doctorat ès sciences politiques from the Institut d´Études Politiques and a livre docência in political science from the University of Sao Paulo.
