June 13, 2013 – Washington, D.C. – On June 5, 2013, President Obama nominated Samantha Power to serve as the 28th U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. The U.S. Senate needs to confirm and vote on the nomination before Ms. Power can officially become the next U.S. representative to the United Nations. Samantha Power most recently served as a Senior Director on the White House National Security Council. 

She is a long-time human rights advocate and served as a founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. In April 2012, President Obama selected her as the chair of the newly-formed Atrocities Prevention Board, with the aim of bringing senior officials across the government and NGO communities to discuss ways to increase U.S. efforts in protecting innocent men, women and children from genocide across the world – an effort President Obama called "a core national security interest and a moral responsibility of the United States."

Ms. Power began her career as a journalist for the Boston Globe covering the Yugoslav wars of the 1990's and has stated that "I have seen UN aid workers enduring shellfire to deliver food to the people of Sudan, yet I've also seen UN peacekeepers fail to protect the people of Bosnia. As the most powerful and inspiring country on this Earth, we have a critical role to play in insisting that the institution meet the necessities of our time. It can do so only with American leadership."  

In her Pulitzer-Prize winning book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, she analyzed U.S. government's responses to the 20th-century acts of genocide. Ms. Power states that she returned from BiH "haunted by the murder of Srebrenica's Muslim men and boys, my own failure to sound a proper early warning, and the outside world's refusal to intervene even once the men's peril had become obvious."

ACBH welcomes and supports the nomination of Samantha Power as the next U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and believes that American leadership is needed in order to eradicate genocide and mass atrocities worldwide.