THE WHITE HOUSE

                     Office of the Press Secretary
                          (Orlando, Florida)
________________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                                  September 9, 1998

                           PRESIDENT CLINTON 
                        NAMES HAROLD HONGJU KOH 
                    AS ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE 
                 FOR DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS AND LABOR

The President today announced his intent to nominate Harold Hongju Koh to be Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

Professor Harold Koh, of New Haven, Connecticut, is currently the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law and Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. Prior to beginning his professorship at Yale in 1985, Professor Koh clerked for both Judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court, and worked as an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Koh has written more than seventy articles on international law, international business transactions, human rights and constitutional law, and is author of several published and forthcoming books on international relations, law and human rights. He has received numerous honors for his human rights work, including the Asian American Bar Association of New York's 1997 Outstanding Lawyer of the Year Award and recognition by the American Lawyer magazine as one of America's 45 leading public sector lawyers under the age of 45.

Professor Koh earned a B.A. from Harvard University in 1975, an Honours B.A. from Oxford University in 1977, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1980. Professor Koh has been a Visiting Fellow and Lecturer at Oxford University, and has taught at the Hague Academy of International Law, the University of Toronto, and the George Washington University National Law Center.

The Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor advises the Secretary on policy implementation relevant to issues associated with democracy, human rights and labor.

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