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Giving Voice to the Voiceless
In 2000, Freedom House, an organization based in Washington, D.C., described the dire state of repression in Sudan, so perilous for human rights that it was the only place in the world where we were asked not to reveal the identity of the defender: “The Sudanese government and its agents are bombing, burning, and raiding southern villages, enslaving thousands of women and children, kidnapping and forcibly converting Christian boys, by sending them to the front as cannon fodder, annihilating entire villages or relocating them into concentration camps called ‘peace villages,’ while preventing food from reaching starving villages. Individual Christians, including clergy, continue to be imprisoned, flogged, tortured, assassinated, and even crucified for their faith.”
Sudan gained independence from Britain in 1956. Thirty years later, Islamic extremists based in Khartoum seized control of the democratically elected government, launching a holy war against their own Christian citizens in the south. This war led to the deaths of 1.9 million people and the displacement of 5 million more. The reign of terror reached far beyond the Christian community, to every person, animist and Muslim alike, who was suspected of failing to adhere to the government’s arbitrary code of conduct. Against all odds, and under threat of certain brutal torture and death, the human rights defender we call Anonymous spread the word of liberty, offering Sudanese compatriots a path to a better future. The civil war between the North and the South officially ended with the signing of the 2005 peace agreement, while, at the same time, a bitter war between the government and rebel factions in Sudan’s westernmost province, Darfur, was being fought. In 2011, The Republic of South Sudan became an independent country.
Political Participation
Ethel Kennedy was born into a large Catholic family in Chicago in 1928. A bright and active young woman, Ethel grew up in Connecticut and married Robert F. Kennedy in 1950. Ethel and Bobby would share a passion for politics, service to their country, and social justice that they would pass on to their eleven children. As the wife of a rising political star, Ethel was often at the forefront of many pivotal events in the mid-20th century such as the McCarthy hearings, the Civil Rights movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the groundbreaking political elections of the 1960’s, and the battle for labor rights. During this time, she encouraged her children to understand the historical importance of the times and be actively involved in improving the lives of others.
In 1968, while running for president of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Ethel would make it her life’s work to pursue their shared vision, and raise their eleven children to value the gift of a contributory life. In honor of her husband, Ethel, along with friends and family, created the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights to ensure his spirit would live on through supporting individuals, alliances, and organizations dedicated to improving human rights around the world. The Center bolsters the efficacy of human rights defenders, and empowers students worldwide through their human rights education program Speak Truth To Power. The RFK Center also recognizes the work of activists, authors, journalists, and students who have stood up against oppression.
As Ethel became a political force in her own right, she personally tackled human rights issues both at home and abroad. She has marched with Cesar Chavez, sat with Native Americans at Alcatraz, boycotted fast food businesses with the Immokolee Workers, demonstrated outside the South African and Chinese embassies, joined the Global March for Children, pulled tires out of the Anacostia River, trekked up mountainous terrain in Mexico to visit unjustly convicted prisoners, traveled to Haiti to see the effects of the US blocking loans, visited Apartheid era South Africa, ( and 40 years later) , crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge with John Lewis, confronted dictator Arap Moi in Nairobi, filled a 757 with relief supplies for African countries, visited orphanages in Angola and raised millions of dollars for human rights work around the globe.
Ethel continues to be politically and social active and loves spending time with her family which includes 37 grandchildren and one great-grand child. Directed by her daughter Rory, the HBO documentary “Ethel” shares her story, and is an educational tool to help students appreciate the life and times in which she lived.
Bullying: language, literature and life
Jamie Nabozny grew up in Ashland, Wisconsin, a small town located on the south shore of Lake Superior. By the time Jamie was in middle school, he found himself the target of physical violence and degrading acts by classmates. When Jamie turned to school officials for help, he was told to expect abuse for his sexual orientation and to stop “acting so gay.” As the attacks continued and school staff looked on with indifference, Jamie lost hope and moved to Minneapolis. Free at last from much of the verbal and physical violence that had dominated his young life, Nabozny realized that he was not alone. Similar acts of abuse were happening to students across the country. Jamie decided to take a stand for his rights and the rights of his fellow students. In 1995, he took legal action against his middle school where he had been so badly beaten by his classmates that he required abdominal surgery to undo the damage. Although his first attempt at legal action was unsuccessful, his case drew the attention of Lambda Legal, a civil-rights oriented law firm. With their help, Jamie took his case to a federal appeals court for a second trial. His new trial issued the first judicial opinion in American history to find a public school accountable for allowing anti-gay abuse, and the school officials liable for Jamie’s injuries. This landmark decision entitled students across the United States to a safe educational experience, regardless of their sexual identity. Today Jamie travels the country speaking to students and teachers about the dangers of bullying and how they can stop it in their schools and communities. Jamie’s story has been turned into a short documentary “Bullied” produced by The Southern Poverty Law Center in 2011.
A Legacy of Leadership in Non-Violent Activism and Community Organizing for Social Change
One of the most courageous persons the Civil Rights Movement ever produced, Congressman John Lewis has dedicated his life to protecting human rights, securing civil liberties, and building what he described as “The Beloved Community” in America.
The “conscience of the U.S. Congress” grew up as the son of sharecroppers, where he was inspired by the activism surrounding the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a protest campaign against racial segregation on public transit that started in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, and by the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to become a part of the Civil Rights Movement; a mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the U.S. that peaked between 1955 and 1965.
As a student at American Baptist College, Lewis organized sit-in demonstrations, was one of the Freedom Riders, who were civil rights activists that rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States, and was named Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he helped form.
By 1963, he was dubbed one of the Big Six leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. At the age of twenty-three, he was an architect of, and a keynote speaker at, the historic March on Washington in August 1963. Attended by some 250,000 people, it was the largest demonstration ever seen in the nation’s capital. The event is remembered for Lewis’ keynote address and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
In 1964, he coordinated voter registration drives and community action programs during the Mississippi Freedom Summer, a campaign in June 1964 that attempted to register as many African-American voters as possible. The following year, Lewis helped lead over 600 peaceful, orderly protestors across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, with intentions to march to Montgomery to demonstrate the need for voting rights in the state. The marchers were attacked by Alabama state troopers in a brutal confrontation that became known as “Bloody Sunday” and hastened the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Despite more than forty arrests, physical attacks, and serious injuries, John Lewis remained a devoted advocate of the philosophy of nonviolence. After leaving SNCC in 1966, he continued his commitment to the Civil Rights Movement as Associate Director of the Field Foundation and his participation in the Southern Regional Council’s voter registration programs. Lewis went on to become the Director of the Voter Education Project (VEP). Under his leadership, the VEP transformed the nation’s political climate by adding nearly four million minorities to the voter rolls.
He was elected to Congress in November 1986 and has served as U.S. Representative of Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District since then.
John Lewis holds a B.A. in Religion and Philosophy from Fisk University, and he is a graduate of the American Baptist Theological Seminary. He has been awarded over fifty honorary degrees and is the recipient of numerous awards from eminent national and international institutions, including the only John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for Lifetime Achievement ever granted.
Multi-National Corporate Responsibility
Ka Hsaw Wa is the founder of EarthRights International, a nongovernmental organization that filed a precedent-setting lawsuit against a U.S. corporation for torture committed by its agents overseas. The suit charges that Burmese government agents hired by Unocal, a U.S.-based oil company, to provide security, transportation, and infrastructure support for an oil pipeline, committed extortion, torture, rape, forced labor, and extrajudicial killings against the local indigenous population. Ka Hsaw Wa knows about the abuses committed by the military regime firsthand. He has spent years walking thousands of miles through the forests of Burma, interviewing witnesses and recording testimonies of victims of human rights abuses. He has taught hundreds of people to investigate, document, and expose violations of international human rights. As a student leader in the 1980s, Ka Hsaw Wa organized pro-democracy demonstrations in Rangoon. He was seized and tortured by agents of the Burmese military regime, in power since 1962 (and renamed SLORC or State Law and Order Restoration Council in late 1988). When police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators, one of Ka Hsaw Wa’s best friends died in his arms. Ka Hsaw Wa fled into exile along the Thai border.
To protect family members he took a new name, Ka Hsaw Wa, which means "white elephant." Ka Hsaw Wa’s meticulously compiled documentation of systemic rape and forced labor is relied upon and cited by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other international organizations. He has collaborated on several books about the abuses, including School for Rape (1988): "Take over 300,000 men, many of them under the age of seventeen and largely uneducated. Force some of them to enlist at gunpoint and promise all of them a salary they never receive entirely. Give them guns and bombs. Train them to shoot, to crawl through the jungle at night, to ambush. Convince them that their enemies are ethnic minorities, students, women, anyone who disagrees with the government, and that these millions of people are traitors or infidels. Starve them. Withhold their mail and don’t allow them to send any letters. Forbid them from visiting their families. Force them to beat each other for punishment. Abandon some of them if they are too sick to walk. Abuse them verbally and physically every day. Allow them plenty of alcohol and drugs. You have just created the army of Burma’s ruling military regime." Ka Hsaw Wa’s work, at tremendous personal risk, continues in the jungles of Burma. Ka Hsaw Wa has been awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, Whitley Fund for Nature/Sting and Trudie Styler Award for Human Rights and the Environment, the Conde Nast Environmental Award, and the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership for his work in defense of human rights and the environment. Ka Hsaw Wa splits his time between the U.S. and Southeast Asia offices of EarthRights International.
Children's Rights and Child Labor
Kailash Satyarthi is India’s lodestar for the abolition of child labor. Since 1980, he has led the rescue of over 75,000 bonded and child slaves in India and developed a successful model for their education and rehabilitation. Kailash has emancipated thousands of children from bonded labor, a form of slavery where a desperate family typically borrows needed funds from a lender (sums as little as $35) and is forced to hand over a child as surety until the funds can be repaid. But often the money can never be repaid—and the child is sold and resold to different masters. Bonded laborers work in the diamond, stonecutting, manufacturing, and other industries. They are especially prevalent in the carpet export business, where they hand-knot rugs for the U.S. and other markets. Satyarthi rescues children and women from enslavement in the overcrowded, filthy, and isolated factories where conditions are deplorable, with inhuman hours, unsafe workplaces, rampant torture, and sexual assault. Satyarthi has faced false charges and death threats for his work. The constant death threats are taken seriously—two of Satyarthi’s colleagues have been murdered. He has been recognized around the world for his work in abolishing child labor. Satyarthi organized and led two great marches across India to raise awareness about child labor. On the global stage, he has been the architect of the single largest civil society network for the most exploited children, the 'Global March Against Child Labor', active in over 140 countries.
Kailash Satyarthi was the recipient of the 1995 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award and the 2002 Raoul Wallenberg Human Rights Award. The U.S. State Department’s 2007 Trafficking in Persons Report has named him a “Hero Acting to End Modern-Day Slavery.”
Political Participation
Born on October 4, 1942, Kek Galabru received her medical degree in France in 1968. She practiced medicine and conducted research in Phnom Penh from 1968 to 1971, and continued her work in Canada, Brazil, and Angola. In 1987– 88 Galabru played a key role in opening negotiations between Hun Sen, president of the Cambodian Council of Ministers, and Prince Sihanouk of the opposition. That led to peace accords ending the civil war in 1991, and elections held under the auspices of the United Nations. Galabru founded the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO) during the United Nations transition period. LICADHO promotes human rights, with a special emphasis on women’s and children’s rights, monitors violations, and disseminates educational information about rights. During the 1993 elections, LICADHO’s 159 staff members taught voting procedures to 16,000 people, trained 775 election observers, and produced and distributed one million voting leaflets. Since then, LICADHO has remained at the forefront of human rights protection efforts in Cambodia by monitoring abuses and providing medical care, legal aid, and advocacy to victims. LICADHO offers direct assistance to victims of human rights violations, especially torture victims, children and women from its headquarters in Phnom Penh and its twelve provincial offices. In 2005, Galabru was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as part of the 1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize project.
The Continuing Struggle of farmworkers in the United States
Librada Paz defends the dignity of immigrant farmworkers in the United States. At the age of 15, she left her indigenous community in southern Mexico in search of an opportunity to improve life for her family. She eventually made her way to New York where she found work in the fields picking vegetables and fruits. Working conditions were harsh and Librada labored in the fields ten hours a day seven days a week just to survive. For ten years, she experienced the harassment, abuse and discrimination that prevail in U.S. agriculture where the dignity and rights of farmworkers are routinely ignored.
Through her strength and passion, Librada became a leading voice for immigrant workers in fields and farms in New York and across the United States. Together with the Rural and Migrant Ministry (RMM), Librada played a key role in the passage of laws requiring that farmworkers be provided with drinking water and restrooms - basic necessities long denied.
Librada is a Council Member for the RMM and a member of the Alianza Campesina, a national women’s farmworker movement. In 2012, Librada received the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for her courageous work and ongoing struggle to improve the lives and working conditions of farmworkers in New York and beyond.
Health Care and Potable Water
Loune Viaud, Director of Operations and Strategic Planning at Zanmi Lasante (Partners in Health – Haiti), has worked with the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights since 2002, when she received the RFK Human Rights Award. Loune was recognized for her innovative human rights-based approach to establishing health care systems in Haiti. Loune was honored, not only for her groundbreaking work in effective, rights-based HIV/AIDS treatment, but for advocating that health, access to medicine, and clean water are all fundamental rights, and working with the local government and citizens to build the government’s capacity to respond to those human rights.
In collaboration with the RFK Center, Loune has worked to transform the international community’s interventions in Haiti, many of which undermine human rights, including the rights to health, water, and food. Loune’s primary concern has been to address the flow of international donor assistance and loan funds into Haiti that have undermined the Haitian government’s ability to fulfill its human rights obligations. Although the Haitian Constitution guarantees the right to health and education, ineffective and poorly coordinated international assistance meant that the Government of Haiti lacked the resources to deliver basic services such as education and health care. Accordingly, the advocacy of Loune and the RFK Center focuses on promoting accountability for the human rights obligations of international interveners in Haiti.
Loune’s ongoing work in Haiti took on an even greater urgency when Haiti was hit by a devastating earthquake in January 2010. Loune has since been working to provide health care to the most vulnerable populations and to strengthen the health care sector. Loune also worked in partnership with the government and other organizations to help establish a children’s shelter for orphaned and abandoned children, many of whom are disabled. She has testified before the U.S. Congress on the urgent need to strengthen the capacity of the Government of Haiti following the earthquake and to effectively include Haitians in the reconstruction.
Labor Rights
Lucas Benitez, a member of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and a farm worker himself, has become a leader in the fight to end slave labor, human trafficking and exploitation in agricultural fields across America. The CIW worked with the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights to lobby major produce buyers in the fast food industry to implement an industry-wide surcharge on Florida tomatoes that will provide a livable wage for Florida’s farm workers. In March 2005 and April 2007, CIW signed historic agreements with Yum! Brands (parent company for Taco Bell) and McDonald’s, respectively, implementing the CIW’s demand for the one-penny-more-per-pound wage increase. RFK Center and CIW are working to broaden consumer and government awareness to create laws that eliminate the exploitation and enslavement of U.S. farm workers. RFK Center is also a founding member of the Alliance for Fair Food (AFF), a network of human rights, religious, student, labor and grassroots organizations dedicated to advancing the human rights of farm workers. Farming has become a multi-billion-dollar industry in which corporations negotiate with growers to purchase mass quantities of product for the lowest possible prices. To maintain profits and income for growers, suppliers and labor contractors, farm workers’ wages have been reduced to far below poverty levels. Furthermore, farm workers’ rights to organize and collectively bargain are not protected by the National Labor Relations Act. Many of these workers have become enslaved and victims of gross human rights abuses. In response to this crisis, the CIW, a farm workers’ rights group, was developed to promote change across the fast food industry.
Combating Poverty
Founder of the Grameen Bank, the world’s largest and most successful microcredit institution, Muhammad Yunus was born in one of the poorest places on earth, the country (then part of Pakistan) of Bangladesh. As a professor of economics, he was struck by the discrepancy between the economic theory taught in universities and the abject poverty around him. Recognizing that the poor remained poor because they had no access to capital, no collateral for loans, and borrowing requirements so modest that it was not cost-effective for large banks to process their needs, Yunus started experimenting with small collateral-free loans to landless rural peasants and impoverished women. In 1983, he founded the Grameen Bank. Its rules were strict and tough. Clients find four friends to borrow with. If any of the five defaults, all are held accountable, building commitment and providing community support. Initial loans are as little as ten dollars, and must be repaid with 20 percent interest. Nearly twenty years later, this revolutionary bank is flourishing, with more than 1,050 branches serving 35,000 villages and two million customers, 94 percent of them women. Ninety-eight percent of Grameen’s borrowers repay their loans in full, a rate of return far higher than that of the rich and powerful. More importantly, the clients are transforming their lives: from powerless and dependent to self-sufficient, independent, and politically astute. The real transformation will be felt by the next generation: a generation with better food, education, medication, and the firsthand satisfaction of taking control of their lives, thanks to Yunus’s vision, creativity, and confidence. Among many awards, Dr. Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. Together with Nelson Mandela, fellow Defender Archbishop Desmond Tutu and select other prominent statesmen, human rights leaders and public figures, Yunus has been a member of the “Global Elders” group.
Environmental Rights
Throughout Africa (as in much of the world) women hold primary responsibility for tilling the fields, deciding what to plant, nurturing the crops, and harvesting the food. They are the first to become aware of environmental damage that harms agricultural production: If the well goes dry, they are the ones concerned about finding new sources of water and those who must walk long distances to fetch it. As mothers, they notice when the food they feed their family is tainted with pollutants or impurities: they can see it in the tears of their children and hear it in their babies' cries. Wangari Maathai, Kenya's foremost environmentalist and women's rights advocate, founded the Green Belt Movement on Earth Day 1977, encouraging the farmers (70 percent of whom are women) to plant "greenbelts" to stop soil erosion, provide shade, and create a source of lumber and firewood. She distributed seedlings to rural women and set up an incentive system for each seedling that survived. To date, the movement has planted over fifteen million trees, produced income for eighty thousand people in Kenya alone, and has expanded its efforts to over thirty African countries, the United States, and Haiti. Maathai won the Africa Prize for her work in preventing hunger, and was heralded by the Kenyan government and controlled press as an exemplary citizen. A few years later, when Maathai denounced President Daniel arap Moi's proposal to erect a sixty-two-story skyscraper in the middle of Nairobi's largest park (graced by a four-story statue of Moi himself), officials warned her to curtail her criticism. When she took her campaign public, she was visited by security forces. When she still refused to be silenced, she was subjected to a harassment campaign and threats. Members of parliament denounced Maathai, dismissing her organization as "a bunch of divorcees." The government-run newspaper questioned her sexual past, and police detained and interrogated her, without ever pressing charges. Eventually Moi was forced to forego the project, in large measure because of the pressure Maathai successfully generated. Years later, when she returned to the park to lead a rally on behalf of political prisoners, Maathai was hospitalized after pro-government thugs beat her and other women protesters. Following the incident, Moi's ruling party parliamentarians threatened to mutilate her genitals in order to force Maathai to behave "like women should." But Wangari Maathai was more determined than ever, and today continues her work for environmental protection, women's rights, and democratic reform. From one seedling, an organization for empowerment and political participation has grown many strong branches. In 2004 Maathai received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her efforts.
In 2005, Maathai was selected to preside over the African Union’s Economic, Social and Cultural Council. She was named one of the 100 most influential people by Time magazine and one of the 100 most powerful women by Forbes magazine. She was honored in 2006 with the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest award. Wangari Maathai died in September 2011 while undergoing cancer treatment at the age of 71.
