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(New York) - Human Rights Watch today celebrated the award of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant to Corinne Dufka, researcher in the Africa Division at Human Rights Watch.

Dufka, 46, became the Sierra Leone researcher for Human Rights Watch in 1999, covering the final years of the civil war and documenting attacks on civilians by both government and rebel troops. She has published Human Rights Watch reports on several subjects, including sexual violence against women and girls in the war; Sierra Leonean refugees in Guinea; and atrocities committed during elections in Côte d'Ivoire in 2000.

For the past year, Dufka has worked for the United Nations-sponsored Special Court for Sierra Leone as an investigator helping to compile war crimes cases. She is now a researcher in the Africa Division based in New York.

This year the MacArthur Foundation made grants to 24 MacArthur Fellows, who will each receive a $500,000 award over five years. The Fellows are chosen every year from many fields of endeavor, and are considered to "demonstrate exceptional creativity and promise."

"Corinne Dufka is truly a woman of exceptional creativity and promise - not to mention bravery and resolve," said Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch. "We're enormously pleased that she has received this extraordinary recognition."

Dufka is the third Human Rights Watch staffer to receive the MacArthur award. Senior advisor Alison Des Forges, an expert on Rwanda, won the award in 1999, and Dorothy Thomas, first executive director of Human Rights Watch's women's rights division, won the award in 1998.

Dufka has also worked as a social worker in El Salvador and as a photojournalist for Reuters in Africa, covering conflicts across the continent, and in the Balkans.

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