Paul Polansky
| Paul Polansky | |
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Paul Polansky at Saronno, Italy in September, 2011
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| Born | Mason City, Iowa, United States |
| Occupation | author |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Alma mater | Marquette University |
| Genre | Poetry Human Rights Oral histories |
| Subject | Roma people, Boxing |
| Notable awards | City of Weimar Human Rights Award, 2004 |
| Website | |
| paulpolansky |
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Paul Polansky is an American author and activist working for the rights of the Romani people in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
Paul Polansky is a graduate in journalism major, history and speech minors, at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (USA). In the early 90s, he founded the Czech Historical Research Center (USA), and holds conferences in several American and European universities in the field of human rights in Eastern Europe.
In the 1990s he discovered 40,000 documents in Czech archives on the Gypsy camp Lety run by the Czechs during World War II. After this discovery, he moved his residence in Czech Republic to pursue his studies, and began to hold conferences, one of them at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In 1999 Polansky start to work for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, to serve as their advisor on Roma (Gypsy) refugee issues in Kosovo.
He went on to become head of the Kosovo Roma Refugee Foundation (KRRF), an NGO working with the afflicted residents of the UN Camps in north Kosovo. From July 1999 until September 2009 he was head of mission for the Society for Threatened Peoples in Kosovo and Serbia. On December 10, 2004, the City Council of Weimar awarded its "Human Rights Award" to Polansky.
Polansky has published twenty-seven books, including eighteen books of poetry, and a number of non-fiction books including UN-Leaded Blood, which denounces described the inaction of UNMIK, as many children died from lead poisoning in the UN camps in north Kosovo.
Polansky produced a documentary film, Gypsy Blood, which won best informative film at the 2005 Golden Wheel International Film Festival in Skopje, Republic of Macedonia.
Polansky was closely involved in a further exposé of inaction regarding the continuing lead poisoning of Roma in north Mitrovica. Dateline's UN's Toxic Shame, a scathing review of the UN's inaction on this scandal by Amos Roberts, aired in Australia on April 26, 2009.
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