CONTACT: LOIS GRAY
International Programs
Iowa City IA 52242
(319) 335-2026
e-mail: lois-gray@uiowa.edu

Release: Oct. 12, 1999

CIVIC honors Westons with International Citizen awards

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Burns Weston and Marta Cullberg Weston will receive the 1999 International Citizen Awards Sunday, Oct. 24 at the 14th anniversary celebration of the Council for International Visitors to Iowa Cities (CIVIC). A social hour begins at 6 p.m., a dinner is at 7 p.m. and the business meeting/election of officers will begin at 8 p.m., all at the Radisson Hotel, Highlander Plaza in Iowa City.

The International Citizen Award was created to honor local citizens who have made outstanding contributions to international understanding.

"It was a happy coincidence which led the CIVIC Board of Directors to choose Burns and Marta Cullberg Weston as the recipients of the 1999 International Citizen Awards," says Tom Baldridge, CIVIC executive director. "Both have been very active in the area of international relations for many years. But, especially over the last year and a half, Burns has been a driving force in the creation and implementation of the university's Global Focus: Human Rights '98 celebration, and Marta has continued her involvement in searching for conflict resolutions in the Balkans and in the region of the Caucasus Mountains."

Burns, who retired from the University of Iowa in 1999 as Bessie Dutton Murray professor of law and associate dean for International and Comparative Legal Studies, was the chair of Global Focus: Human Rights '98. This series of events celebrated the 50th anniversary of the United Declaration of Human Rights. He continues to be instrumental in launching the new University of Iowa Human Rights Center (UIHRC).

In 1966, he joined the faculty of the College of Law and since then has served as founding director of the UI's former Center for World Order Studies (now the global studies program), visiting professor of international law at Grinnell College and the UCLA School of Law, and senior fellow and director of the Transnational Academic Program of the Institute for World Order in New York City.

Weston's teaching and research interests center on international jurisprudence, international human rights law, the laws of war, the law of State responsibility (particularly in relation to the concerns of developing countries), and international environmental law.

His wife, Dr. Marta Cullberg Weston, is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst and author of numerous books and articles on a variety of psychological subjects. In addition to her work as a therapist, Marta has served on the board of a Swedish Peace Research Institute since the beginning of the 1980s, where she worked with international conflict resolution and ethnic conflicts. She has been involved with the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia since the wars started in 1991 and has written extensively about ethnic conflicts from a psychological perspective.

When the reports about the mass rapes in Bosnia surfaced, Marta Cullberg Weston, together with a group of women in Sweden, started a relief organization in 1993 called Kvinna till Kvinna (Woman to Woman). The organization is involved in the rebuilding efforts of women all over the former Yugoslavia. Dr. Weston has traveled extensively in the area in support of different projects for traumatized women and was in Albania in the refugee camps in the spring. Marta moved to Iowa City in 1994. While living in Iowa City she has pursued her international engagements together with her husband.

Reservations for the CIVIC anniversary celebration will be taken until Wednesday, Oct. 20. The cost is $30 per person. For more information or to register, call 335-0351. Or, a check may be mailed to CIVIC, 120 International Center, Iowa City, Iowa 52242.

CIVIC is a community organization of volunteers serving and hosting international visitors as a means of promoting global understanding on a person-to-person basis. CIVIC is affiliated with UI International Programs, which consists of a number of offices, centers, degree programs, academic programs, research projects and services. Organized under the associate provost and dean for international programs, these units serve to further internationalize the campus and community and promote global scholarship, teaching and research.

For more information about the organization or the anniversary celebration, call Tom Baldridge at 335-0351.