Camilo Pérez-Bustillo
Camilo Pérez-Bustillo is Director of Advocacy, Research and Leadership Development at Hope Border Institute/Instituto Fronterizo Esperanza in El Paso, Texas, which specialises in human rights issues in the US-Mexico border region from a grassroots, faith-based perspective. He is also a Research Fellow at the University of Dayton (UD) School of Law and former inaugural Executive Director of the Human Rights Center at UD.
Pérez-Bustillo is co-author with Karla Hernández Mares of Human Rights, Hegemony, and Utopia in Latin America: Poverty, Forced Migration, and Resistance in Mexico and Colombia (Brill/Haymarket, 2016).
Other publications include:
https://www.hopeborder.org/ff-principles-and-policies
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1000-human-rights-hegemony-and-utopia-in-latin-america
Pérez-Bustillo graduated with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Northeastern University Law School, Boston, Massachusetts, in May 1981, was co-founder and co-director of Multicultural Education, Training and Advocacy (META), Inc. a human rights NGO in the U.S. from 1982 to 1993, was the first person of Latin American origin appointed to the W. Haywood Burns Memorial Chair for Civil Rights Law (a 1 year endowed appointment) at the City University of New York (CUNY) Law School during 2002-2003, and served as Director of Immigrant and Refugee Rights at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Philadelphia from 2003 to 2005.
He is a member of the Committee on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of the International Law Association, of the international organizing committees of the World Social Forum on Migration, and of the Global Alternative Forum of Peoples in Movement and its International Tribunal of Conscience (the first of its kind focused on issues affecting migrants, refugees, and the displaced), and has been an advisor on issues regarding human rights and poverty to the UN Human Rights Council. He was the first holder of the Emil Bustamante international human rights chair by the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO).
He has written extensively on global human rights discourse and practices and their historical, philosophical, and ethical origins, and regarding the rights of indigenous peoples, and migrants, refugees, and the displaced ("peoples in movement") in the context of poverty and inequality. He has co-edited the book The Poverty of Rights: Human Rights and the Eradication of Poverty published by Zed books in the CROP International Studies in Poverty Research series that has drawn international attention. He has been engaged with CROP´s work on human rights and poverty since 1997.
