Press Release

A multidimensional personality, Ven. Prof. Claude d’Estrée is Professor of International Law and Human Rights and the Buddhist Chaplain at the University of Denver (DU) and  has been a member of the faculty since 2002.  ICHRRF welcomed Prof. d'Estree as the newest Member of its International Advisory Board.

Prof. d'Estree's first position at DU was a joint appointment at the Department of Religion, the Department of Philosophy and at Sturm College of Law, where he was fortunate to work closely with Professor Ved Nanda and Katharine Nanda. In 2004 he moved to the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at DU. 

Prof. d'Estree received his M.T.S. in Comparative Religion at Harvard Divinity School, the P.O.N. (Program on Negotiation) at Harvard Law School and his J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law.  He was appointed as the first Buddhist Chaplain to Harvard University by H.H. the Dalai Lama in 1979 and is a lineage holder in both the Gelug-pa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and the Jogye Order of Korean Seon (Zen) Buddhism.  

Academically, Prof. d'Estree has been teaching “International Humanitarian Law of Armed Conflict (IHL/LOAC)” as well as courses on “Torture,” “International Law and Human Rights,” “Forced Labor and Human Trafficking,” “Climate Justice,” “Climate Migration and Human Rights,” and “Trafficking in Persons/Smuggling of Migrants (TIP/SOM).” 

Prof. d'Estree is the founder and director of the Human Trafficking Center and the director of the Center on Human Rights Education.  He is a former Special Rapporteur to the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (UN.GIFT) and advisor to E4J (Education for Justice), an initiative of United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) where he was given the Education for Justice Champions Award in 2020.