Robert R Amsterdam is a founding partner of Amsterdam & Peroff, a Toronto based international law firm with affiliated offices in Paris, Miami and Beijing.  In practice since 1980, Mr. Amsterdam has extensive experience litigating and arbitrating corporate disputes in emerging markets, focusing on the areas of individual and corporate human rights.  Mr. Amsterdam was retained by Mikhail Khodorkovsky in August, 2003 as part of the YUKOS-Group MENATEP defense team. Since then, he has worked with Russian human rights lawyers to prepare a White Paper on international human rights issues as they relate to the
prosecution of Platon Lebedev, Alexei Pichugin and Khodorkovsky.

Since Mr. Khodorkovsky’s arrest, Mr. Amsterdam has had extensive contacts with government officials, parliamentarians and human rights organizations in Western Europe, Canada and the United States on Mr. Khodorkovsky’s behalf; he has also been interviewed by The New York Times, Financial Times, BBC, Globe and Mail, National Post, Le Monde and other major media. Last December, Mr. Amsterdam was the first non-Russian member of the defense team to be permitted into a bail hearing for Mr. Khodorkovsky.

(c) 2007 The University of Chicago.  Recorded as a part of The World Beyond the Headlines series, a collaborative project of the Center for International Studies, the International House Global Voices Program, and the Seminary Co-op Bookstores. The series aims to bring scholars and journalists together to consider major international issues and how they are covered in the media.

Recorded Tuesday, October 02, 2007 at University of Chicago.