Vulnerable Populations: International Community Responsibilities

October 31, 2005

Professor Ernesto Zedillo delivered opening remarks at the 2005 Hilton Humanitarian Symposium.

This seventh international humanitarian assembly sponsored by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation brought together leaders from governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), foundations, corporations, and multilateral institutions to reflect on the international community's responsibility towards vulnerable populations—those threatened by extreme poverty, disease, violence, war and conflict, discrimination and oppression—and the role of the Millennium Development Goals in delivering a future to them. In addition to the distinguished panelists, Ernesto Zedillo, former President of Mexico and director of the Center for the Study of Globalization at Yale University, delivered the keynote address. As in previous years, the Symposium was broadcast on the Internet.

The Symposium was held in conjunction with the tenth annual presentation of the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize. Paul Rusesabagina, former manager of the Mille Collines hotel in Kigali, Rwanda, whose heroic story was featured in the movie, Hotel Rwanda, was the keynote speaker at the Prize dinner ceremony honoring 2005 Prize recipient, Partners In Health, following the day-long gathering.

Speakers and presentations

Louise Arbour

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights

Responsibility to Protect: The End of Ambiguity (pdf)

Mayra Buvinic

World Bank – Sector Director, Gender, Development, Poverty

Gender and the Millennium Development Goals (pdf)

Melvin Cheatham, M.D., FACS

Samaritan's Purse

North Korea: An Unseen, But Vulnerable Population (pdf)

Francis M. Deng, LL.B., LL.M., J.S.D.

Former Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General on Internally Displaced Persons; Brookings-Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies Project on Internal Displacement

Sudan—A Nation in Turbulence in Search of Itself (pdf)