Writer and producer Sig Libowitz will join a panel discussion of his film “The Response” at 7 p.m. Nov. 17 in the auditorium of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies. Shortlisted for the 2010 Academy Awards, “The Response” also won the 2009 American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award for best of the year in Drama & Literature joining past winners “Judgment at Nuremberg,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Twelve Angry Men.”

The 30-minute film places the audience at the center of a courtroom drama based on declassified transcripts of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) held at Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. The discussion panel will include Libowitz, Tom Parker, policy director for Terrorism, Counterterrorism and Human Rights at Amnesty International, and moderator Max Guirguis, associate professor of political science at Shepherd University.

The event is free and open to the public.

Sig Libowitz, with an extensive background in filmmaking and acting, wrote and produced the film while at the University of Maryland School of Law after reading actual tribunal transcripts for a homeland security class. He is now an associate at Venable LLP.

Before joining Amnesty International, Parker was executive director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center in New Haven, Conn. He has also worked as a consultant on post-conflict justice issues, as a war crimes investigator with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and as a counterterrorist official with the British government.

Co-sponsor Amnesty International Upper Potomac Chapter Group 539 is composed of Shepherd students, as well as members of surrounding communities in the multi-state Upper Potomac Region. Amnesty International (AI) is a worldwide human rights organization. For more information see www.shepherd.edu/amnestyi.

The Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies, cosponsor, is a private, nonpartisan, and nonprofit educational organization administered by the Congressional Education Foundation with facilities on the campus of Shepherd University. The mission of the Center is to help foster better public understanding of the United States Congress, the Constitution, and representative democracy both historically and in a contemporary setting.