Areas of Interest: Human rights, Brazil, Latin America, Burma/Myanmar.
Paolo Pinheiro is adjunct professor of international relations at the Institute.
He is research coordinator at the Center for the Study of Violence, and professor of political science (retired) at the University of São Paulo. He has also taught at Columbia University, Notre Dame University, Oxford University, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris.
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).
He is research coordinator at the Center for the Study of Violence, and professor of political science (retired) at the University of São Paulo. He has also taught at Columbia University, Notre Dame University, Oxford University, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris.
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).
Pinheiro is a commissioner and rapporteur on children with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and Organization of America States. He co-chairs with former Irish President Mary Robinson an Eminent Persons Panel, appointed by the Swiss Government, which in 2009 published the Agenda for Human Rights: Protecting Dignity. From 2004 to 2007 he was an advisor to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
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.