NY State
Defending Children's Rights/Child Soldiers
The war in Mozambique (1985–1992) left 250,000 children displaced and 200,000 orphaned, while tens of thousands more were forcibly recruited and put into combat. It was rare that government forces and guerrillas engaged- combat was waged almost exclusively against unarmed civilians. In the midst of the brutality Abubacar Sultan traveled the country across roadless lands and on tiny planes to rescue the children of war- kids, six to thirteen years old, who had been forced to witness and, in some cases, to commit atrocities against family members and neighbors. Sultan trained over five hundred people in community-based therapies and his project reunited over 4,000 children with their families. Sultan put his life at grave risk on a daily basis. Today he continues his work with children, concentrating on community education and children’s rights through his initiative Wona Sanana.
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.
Peace as Economic Justice
Betty Williams has devoted her life to the advancement of peace and justice through non-violent means in Northern Ireland. Williams, along with Mairead Corrigan Maguire, co-founded the Community of Peace People, an organization dedicated to bringing together Catholics and Protestants end to sectarian violence.
Williams and Maguire witnessed a car crash that claimed the lives of two nephews and a niece. The driver, a member of the Irish Republican Army, had been fatally shot by British troops and his car veered into a crowd of pedestrians, killing three children. Williams, a Protestant, began circulating petitions through Protestant neighborhoods calling for an end to the sectarian violence. She gathered more than six thousand signatures. At the children’s funeral, Williams met Maguire, a Catholic, and they subsequently cofounded the Community of Peace People.
Williams and the Community of Peace People organized non-sectarian marches to end the violence. In one instance she organized a women’s march in which 10,000 Catholic and Protestant women marched to the graves of the children. The following week 35,000 people attended to show their support for unity and ending the conflict.
Williams currently serves as president of World Centers of Compassion for Children, whose mission is to provide a strong political voice for children in areas afflicted by war, hunger, social, economic or political upheaval. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with Mairead Corrigan Maguire in 1976 in recognition of her dedication to ending the violence in Northern Ireland and building a peaceful future.
Promoting Change and Understanding Through Non-Violent Means
Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, a Roman Catholic bishop, played an instrumental role in bringing peace to East Timor during the Indonesian occupation, from 1975-99. He was born in 1948 in Wailakama, a small rural village in East Timor, where he attended Catholic schools. In 1973, Belo traveled to Portugal to study theology and philosophy in preparation for the priesthood. During his absence, East Timor was granted independence from Portugal, but was subsequently invaded by Indonesia. The Indonesian occupation lasted 24 years and resulted in more than 200,000 deaths. In 1980, Belo was ordained as a priest in Portugal and returned to East Timor to serve as director of Fatumaca College. Eight years later, Belo was appointed apostolic administrator of the Dili Diocese by Indonesian President Suharto. In his new position, Belo assumed leadership of the Catholic Church of East Timor and became an outspoken representative
of the people. Within five months after his appointment, Belo delivered a sermon protesting the brutalities of the Kraras Massacre in 1975, in which Indonesia invaded and forcibly annexed East Timor. Despite multiple attempts on his life, Belo continued to publicly object to the ruthless and oppressive policies of the Indonesian government. He organized multiple nationwide peaceful protests which culminated in the eventual discharge of two Indonesian military generals. Throughout the movement for East Timor’s independence, Belo remained an avid believer in nonviolent resistance. In an open statement in 1994 he demanded that the government withdraw its military force, grant basic civil rights to its citizens and allow East Timor to conduct a democratic referendum, which was a chief contributing factor to East Timor’s independence in 2002. Belo was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1996 for his selfless efforts to bring peace and democracy to East Timor.
China, Tibet, and a Message of Non-Violence
The ninth child born to a farming family in the Chinese border region of Amdo in 1935, two-year-old Lhamo Thondup was recognized by Tibetan monks as the fourteenth reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, considered a manifestation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Renamed Tenzin Gyatso, he was brought to Lhasa to begin a sixteen-year education in metaphysical and religious texts to prepare him for his role as spiritual leader. The Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1949, and its aftermath, introduced brutal repressions in which thousands of Tibetans were executed in prisons or starved to death in prison camps, and hundreds of monasteries, temples, and other cultural and historic buildings were pillaged and demolished. In their effort to eradicate Tibetan culture and identity, the Chinese forced Tibetans to dress like Chinese, to profess atheism, to burn books, and to condemn, humiliate, and kill their elders and teachers. His life in jeopardy, the Dalai Lama fled into exile in northern India along with 80,000 Tibetans in 1959; he has never returned. Meanwhile, new waves of repression erupted in the 1960s and 1980s that continue in the present. To date, the Chinese government has murdered, massacred, tortured, or starved to death over one million Tibetans: one-fifth of the population. In the face of this state oppression, where do Tibetans gather strength to continue the struggle? His Holiness the Dalai Lama inspires Tibetans to embrace their beliefs and hold fast to their dreams. He has demanded that we think of those who have stolen his land and massacred his people, not as murderers and thieves, but as human beings deserving of forgiveness and compassion. Since 1959, His Holiness has received over 84 awards, honorary doctorates, and other prizes, in recognition of his lifelong message of peace, non-violence, inter-religious understanding, universal responsibility and compassion, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. His Holiness has also authored more than 72 books and describes himself as a simple Buddhist monk.
Reconciliation
Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s work confronting the bigotry and violence of South Africa’s apartheid system won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. Born in 1931 in Klerksdorf, he graduated from the University of South Africa in 1954 and was ordained as a priest in 1960. He studied and taught in England and South Africa, and in 1975 he was appointed dean of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Johannesburg, the first black South African to hold that position. In 1978 he became the first black general secretary of the South African Council of Churches. Outspoken against the evils of apartheid, he was vilified by friend and foe, press and politicians, yet through his extraordinary patriotism and commitment to humanity, his vision, and ultimately, his faith, he persevered. After South Africa’s first democratic, non-racial elections in 1994, effectively ending eighty years of white minority rule, the new parliament created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, appointing Tutu as its head to lead his country in an agonizing and unwavering confrontation of the brutality of the past. His faith in the Almighty is exemplified by his belief in the Word made flesh; that the battle for the triumph of good will be won or lost, not by prayers alone, but by actions taken to confront evil here on earth.
Today Archbishop Tutu chairs “the Elders” a group of prominent world leaders who contribute their integrity and moral stature to deal with some of the world’s most pressing issues. Other members include Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson, Aung San Suu Kyi, and fellow Speak Truth To Power defender Muhammad Yunus.
Speaking Truth to Genocide
Elie Wiesel was brought up in a closely knit Jewish community in Sighet, Transylvania (Romania). When he was fifteen years old, his family was herded aboard a train and deported by Nazis to the Auschwitz death camp. Wiesel’s mother and younger sister died at Auschwitz—two older sisters survived. Wiesel and his father were then taken to Buchenwald, where his father also perished. In his autobiography, Wiesel writes: “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a
silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself. Never.” Wiesel has devoted his life to ensuring that the world does not forget the atrocities of the Nazis, and that they are not repeated. After the war, Wiesel became a journalist in Paris, ending his silence about his experiences during the Holocaust with the publication of Night in 1958. Translated into twenty-five languages, with millions of copies in print around the world, Night is a searing account of the Nazi death camps. Wiesel has since written more than forty books, and won numerous awards for his writing and advocacy. He served as the chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, and was the founding chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. For his literary and human rights activities, he has received numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal and the Medal of Liberty Award, and the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor. In 1986 he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Wiesel teaches at Boston University and travels the globe advocating for human rights and the discussion of ethical issues.
Equality and Compromise in South Africa
In South Africa, from 1948 until 1994, there was a system of legal racial segregation known as apartheid. Under apartheid, laws stripped black people and other minorities of their rights and dignity. However, in 1994, through the efforts of a reform-minded President Frederik De Klerk and the ANC leader Nelson Mandela they brought an end to apartheid.
De Klerk‘s political career began in 1969, when he was elected to the House of Assembly, one of the houses of Parliament. He quickly moved up in the National Party where he was appointed head of several ministerial divisions including: mines and energy affairs, internal affairs, national education and planning. During this time in his career, de Klerk earned a reputation for supporting segregated universities and was not known to advocate reform.
In February 1989 he was elected head of the National Party. Only seven months later, after president P.W. Botha stepped down due to a stroke, de Klerk became South Africa’s new President. As President, de Klerk committed himself to the reform of the apartheid system. He entered into talks with representatives from four official racial groups (white, black, colored and Indian) to negotiate a post-apartheid constitution. De Klerk ordered the release of political prisoners including anti-apartheid activist and future South African President Nelson Mandela and lifted the ban on political groups such as the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania.
In 1991 de Klerk’s efforts culminated in the government’s repeal of the apartheid legislation, which was strongly supported by white voters. De Klerk, Nelson Mandela and several other representatives drafted a new constitution which led to multi-racial national elections resulting in the victory of the ANC and Mandela. In 1993, de Klerk received the Nobel Peace Prize along with Nelson Mandela for their contributions to the establishment of nonracial democracy in South Africa and ending apartheid.
Forced Labor
Brought up as one of eight children of a Shanghai banker, Harry Wu attended a Jesuit school before enrolling in Beijing College of Geology in the late 1950s. In the throes of a Communist purge, his university was given a quota of counterrevolutionary elements, and relegated Wu to nineteen years in the Chinese gulag, known as the laogai. There, he survived physical and psychological torture, living for a time on only ground-up corn husks. In his autobiography Bitter Winds, he describes chasing rats through the fields in order to steal the grains in their nests, or eating snakes. After his release, Wu accepted a position as an unpaid visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, arriving in the United States in 1985 with forty dollars. After ten days of pursuing research by day and sleeping on a park bench by night, he landed a job on the graveyard shift at a doughnut shop where he ate three meals a day and had a place to stay at night. (To date, he cannot touch a doughnut.) Wu returned, or tried to return, to China a total of five times. While there, twice in 1991 and once in 1994, Wu documented conditions in prisons and labor camps for Sixty Minutes and other news programs, and was placed on China’s most wanted list for his exposés. In 1995, on his fifth trip, he was caught. While Wu spent sixty-six days in detention, awaiting news of his fate, a worldwide campaign for his release was launched, including demands that Hillary Clinton boycott the Beijing Summit of Women. China released him, and his return to U.S. soil was celebrated across the country.
Wu frequently testifies on Capitol Hill about the latest abuses he has uncovered—the for-profit selling of executed prisoners’ organs by Chinese officials, the illegal export of prison labor products (such as diesel engines and Chicago Bulls apparel), the frequency of public executions, the unfair restrictions on reproductive rights and their appalling enforcement procedures. The Laogai Research Foundation, which Wu founded and directs, estimates there have been fifty million people incarcerated in the laogai since 1950, and that there are eight million people in forced labor today. In 2004 Harry Wu took part in Speak Truth to Power activities in Rome, Italy. In November 2008, Wu opened the Laogai Museum in Washington D.C., the first museum in the world to exclusively deal with human rights in China. Harry Wu’s self-proclaimed goal is to put the word laogai in every dictionary in the world, and to that end, works eighteen-hour days criss-crossing the country and the globe speaking with student groups and heads of state to make this present-day horror become a past memory.
Protection from Landmines
Jody Williams has dedicated her life to achieving a global ban on antipersonnel landmines, which still claim thousands of innocent lives every year. In 1992, she launched the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), to end to the production, trade, use and stockpiling of landmines, a weapon that has been in existence since the U.S. Civil War. Williams organized the ICBL to work with more than 1,000 NGO’s in 60 countries worldwide. As the ICBL’s chief strategist, Williams has written and spoken widely on the global problems involving the use of landmines. In 1996, Williams and the ICBL drafted the Ottawa Treaty with the Canadian government to ban landmines globally. To date, the Ottawa Treaty has been signed by 156 countries. Almost as noteworthy as the international support she created is the way she built that support. In the years before the Internet, Williams created a network of hundreds of organizations with a system for accountability through the use of fax machines. Through a simple system of sending faxes out to each constituent organization, Williams simultaneously made each organization feel they were an important part of the network and also created a system to maintain a permanent record of their interactions.
This pioneering spirit also led to Williams playing a key role in the creation of The Nobel Women’s Initiative, an organization of female Nobel Peace Prize winners dedicated to supporting women’s rights around the world. Williams received the Nobel Peace prize in 1997 for her work in the banning and clearing of anti-personnel mines.
Reconciliation
José Ramos-Horta received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 for his uncompromising and indefatigable work on behalf of the people of East Timor, brutally invaded by Indonesia in 1975. Muslim West Timor became part of Indonesia in 1946, while East Timor, settled in 1520 by the Portuguese with different language, religion, and customs, remained a colony until Portugal’s withdrawal in 1975. Twenty-five-year-old José Ramos-Horta was named foreign minister of the newly formed government in November 1975, but only a month later, Indonesian troops massed around the capital city, Dili, and, as Ramos-Horta’s plane touched down in Portugal, he was told that Indonesia had taken control of his country. In the years following the invasion, one-third of the population was to lose their lives to massacres, starvation, epidemics, and terror. Throughout the next two decades, Ramos-Horta traveled the globe speaking out against abuses, and, in 1992, he put forth a peace plan which called for a phased withdrawal of Indonesian troops culminating in a referendum in which the people of East Timor would vote for independence, integration into Indonesia, or free association with Portugal. When the September 1999 vote showed that 80 percent of Timorese had voted for independence, Indonesian armed forces and their militia allies went on a rampage. They massacred hundreds, burned to the ground 70 percent of the standing structures in the country, set fire to crops, killed thousands of farm animals, and destroyed major sewer systems and electric lines. Hundreds of thousands were forced into exile at gun-point. Ramos-Horta led the international charge against the slaughter, and, because of his appeals, the United Nations sent in troops to stop the violence. In December 1999, after twenty-four years in exile, José Ramos-Horta finally went home again to a free and independent East Timor. In May 2007, Ramos-Horta began serving as president of East Timor having previously served in other important government positions. In September 2008, Ramos-Horta survived an assassination attempt that left him critically injured. He fully recovered and served out his term as President of East TImor, leaving office on May 19, 2012.
Defender Against Modern Slavery and Trafficking
Enslaved in a shrine in her native Ghana as a young child under a custom known as Trokosi, she was forced to work without pay, without food or clothing, and to perform sexual services for the holy man. She was able to escape seventeen years later, after several failed attempts, at the age of twenty-three. Trokosi comes from an Ewe word meaning “slave of the gods,” and is understood as a religious and cultural practice in which young girls, mostly virgins, are sent into lifelong servitude to atone for the alleged crimes of their relatives. In 1997, it was estimated that approximately five thousand young girls and women were being kept in 345 shrines in the southeastern part of Ghana. Through Juliana Dogbadzi’s daring escape and her subsequent efforts to denounce the system, the Trokosi practice was banned in Ghana in 1999; however, law enforcement against Trokosi is still lax. Dogbadzi continues to speak out against Trokosi, traveling the country, meeting with slaves, and trying to win their emancipation.
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.
Solidarity
Lech Walesa began his career in Poland’s Gdansk shipyards where his activism and charisma helped push his country to semi-free Parliamentary elections in which he was elected President.
Walesa co-founded Solidarity, the Soviet Bloc’s first independent trade union. He became a symbol of democracy and is widely recognized for leading Poland out of Communism. His actions are viewed as the crucial first step in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Walesa spent his early life as a mechanic and then in the Polish military. When he resigned from the military, Walesa was hired as an electrician at Gdansk shipyards. Troubled by the poor treatment of his fellow workers, he became involved in trade-union activism and quickly rose to prominence after organizing a strike in 1970. His activism garnered the attention of the Polish Government which soon placed him under surveillance. In 1976, he was fired from his position after multiple arrests. Walesa then emerged as a leader of the growing movement calling for better working conditions and the right to free association. In 1980, Walesa played an instrumental role in negotiations of the Gdansk Agreement between the Polish Government and striking workers, an agreement that culminated in the creation of Solidarity.
After the government imposed martial law and outlawed Solidarity, Walesa and his fellow activists were arrested and detained. Upon his release he returned to the docks as an electrician and continued his activism. The leading underground weekly paper featured his motto, “Solidarity will not be divided or destroyed”. His continued dedication led to the 1989 Round Table Agreement which resulted in a Solidarity-led government in which Lech Walesa was elected as President of Poland.
Although his presidency lasted only one term, his administration oversaw the transformation of Poland to a free market economy. After Walesa left office, the Polish economy was among the healthiest in central and eastern Europe. Walesa remains a symbol of hope and has inspired many to pursue similar aspirations of rights and freedoms throughout the world. In 1983, Lech Walesa received the Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to human rights and for playing a vital role in shaping Solidarity in his country.
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.
From Bystander to Active Peace Builder
Mairead Corrigan Maguire was not actively involved with the Northern Ireland peace movement until she came face-to-face with violence in 1976. On August 10th, Danny Lennon and John Chillingworth of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), were driving through Belfast, with a rifle in their car. The IRA wanted to form a united Ireland through physical force that would be outside of United Kingdom control.
British troops, claiming that the rifle had been pointed at them, opened fire on the car instantly killing Lennon and seriously wounding Chillingworth. The car veered onto the sidewalk striking Mairead’s sister Anne and three of her children. While Anne survived, her three children died. Another peace activist, Betty Williams, also witnessed the crash and assembled 200 women to march for an end to the violence. When the marchers passed by Maguire’s home she quickly joined in.
Shortly after the march, Community of Peace People was founded by Maguire and Williams. Based on their shared belief that reconciliation was possible through the gradual integration of schools, residential areas and athletic clubs. Community of Peace People organized summer camps for Catholics and Protestants youths in an effort to create friendships in a secure and tolerant environment. The organization also published a biweekly paper, Peace by Peace, and provided families of prisoners’ bus service to and from Belfast’s jails.
In 1976, Maguire and Betty Williams were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for their contributions to the resolution of the problems in Northern Ireland. Since winning the award, Mairead Corrigan Magurie co-founded the Committee on Administration of Justice, a human rights organization that has been actively involved in the attempt to free political prisoners world-wide, from Nobel Peace Prize winners Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi to China’s Liu Xiaobo of China.
Violence Against Women
Marina Pisklakova is Russia’s leading women’s rights activist. She studied aeronautical engineering in Moscow, and while conducting research at the Russian Academy of Sciences, was startled to discover family violence had reached epidemic proportions. Because of her efforts, Russian officials started tracking domestic abuse and estimate that, in a single year, close to 15,000 women were killed and 50,000 were hospitalized, while only one-third to one-fifth of all battered women received medical assistance. With no legislation outlawing the abuse, there were no enforcement mechanisms, support groups, or protective agencies for victims. In July 1993, Pisklakova founded a hot line for women in distress, later expanding her work to establish the first women’s crisis center in the country. She lobbied for legislation banning abuse, and worked with an openly hostile law enforcement establishment to bring aid to victims and prosecution to criminals. She began a media campaign to expose the violence against women and to educate women about their rights, and regularly appears on radio and television promoting respect for women’s rights. Today her organization ANNA (National Center for the Prevention of Violence) operates a network of 170 crisis centers across Russia and the former Soviet Union. She is now active not only in combating the scourge of violence against women, but also trafficking of women and children. In 2004 she was the recipient of the Human Rights Global Leadership Award. Pisklakova’s efforts have saved countless lives, at great risk to her own.
Free Expression, Free Elections, and Democratic Reforms
Born to Russian peasants in 1931, Mikhail Gorbachev quickly ascended the ladder of power in the Soviet Union. In his youth, Gorbachev joined the Komsomol or “Youth Communist League” and drove a combine harvester at a state-run farm in his hometown. Local party officials recognized his promise and sent him to law school at Moscow State University. At university, Gorbachev was an active Communist Party member and, by 1970, first secretary of the regional party committee. Only ten years later, Gorbachev had risen to the youngest full member of the Politburo, which was the highest executive committee in the Soviet Union.
In 1985, after two general secretaries of the Politburo died within a year of each other, the Party was looking for younger leadership. On March 11, 1985, the Politburo elected Mikhail Gorbachev general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. After his election, Gorbachev set about installing bold reforms. Domestically, he pushed the Soviet bureaucracy to be more efficient, to increase worker production and to rapidly modernize. When his reforms yielded few results, Gorbachev instituted more far-reaching reforms including glasnost, or “openness,” to encourage free expression and information, and perestroika, or “restructuring,” that encouraged democratic processes and free-market ideas to take hold in Soviet economic and political life. He also worked for warmer relations and new trade partners abroad.
In 1987, he and U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed an agreement calling for both sides to destroy all of their intermediate-range nuclear-tipped missiles. In 1989, he openly supported reformist groups in Eastern European Soviet-bloc countries and informed their communist leaders that in the event of a revolution, he would not intervene. As a result, reformist groups overthrew the communist regimes and Gorbachev began withdrawing Soviet troops. By the summer of 1990, he even agreed to a reunification of East and West Germany. As power quickly shifted to new political parties, Gorbachev dismantled large swaths of the political structure throughout the Soviet Union. On December 25, 1991, the day he resigned, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. In 1990, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his leading role in the peace process.
Nuclear Arms Control
Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei of Egypt served three consecutive terms as the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 1997 to 2009. The IAEA was created by the United Nations in 1957 to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
Within the first few months of Dr. ElBaradei’s tenure with the IAEA, he and his staff began to search more intensely for undeclared nuclear activities around the world. In 2002, ElBaradei and former IAEA Director General Hans Blix personally traveled to Iraq, with a team of UN weapons inspectors, to prove that documents suggesting Iraq had tried to purchase uranium for nuclear weapons were inauthentic. Despite the proof that ElBaradei and Blix found in Iraq, the U.S. invasion began on March 19, 2003.
Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Dr. ElBaradei also mediated Iran’s controversial nuclear policy. Later elected as the leader of the National Association for Change in Egypt, ElBaradei became a major voice for democratic change and played a key role in the 2011 protests, which led to the ousting of former president Hosni Mubarak.
ElBaradei has lectured on the subjects of international law, international organizations, arms control and the peaceful use of nuclear energy and has authored several books and articles on these topics. ElBaradei was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for Peace in 2005, for his efforts in advocating for the safe use of nuclear energy.
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.
Peace by Disarmament
War raged throughout Central America. The Sandinistas ruled Nicaragua with Soviet backing, and right-wing military governments fought guerrilla insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala, while tensions in Honduras were fueled by millions in military aid from the United States and the USSR. Oscar Arias dared to advocate for peace against these powerful Cold War interests and to broker the Arias Peace Plan, which brought a cessation of fighting to his neighbors and prosperity to his own peaceful country of Costa Rica. Born in 1940, Arias studied law and economics at the University of Costa Rica and received a doctoral degree at the University of Essex, England. Appointed minister of planning and economic policy in Costa Rica in 1972, he was elected to Congress in 1978 and to the presidency in 1986. On the day he was inaugurated, Arias called for an alliance for democracy and social and economic liberty throughout Latin America. In 1987, he drafted the peace plan, which led to the Esquipulas II accords, signed by all the Central American presidents on August 7. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending conflict in the region. Since then, Arias has used his considerable moral authority to embark on a worldwide campaign for human development, democracy, and demilitarization, applying the lessons from the Central American peace process to conflicts across the globe. From 2006 until May 2010, President Arias served his second term as president of Costa Rica.
Indigenous Rights
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is a heroine to Maya Indians in Guatemala and indigenous peoples throughout the world. Born into an impoverished family in 1959, the daughter of an active member of the CUC (Committee of Campesinos [Agricultural Workers]), she joined the union in 1979, despite the fact that several members of her family had been persecuted for their membership. In the early 1980s, the Guatemalan military launched a “scorched earth campaign,” burning more than four hundred Mayan villages to the ground, massacring hundreds of children, women, and the infirm; and brutally torturing and murdering anyone suspected of dissenting from the policy of repression. The military killed up to two hundred thousand people, mostly Mayan Indians, and forced one million people into exile. Menchú’s mother and brother were kidnapped and killed, and her father burned alive. While the Guatemalan army marched against its people, the rest of the world remained almost completely silent.
In 1983, Menchú published her autobiography, an account of the Guatemalan conflict. I, Rigoberta Menchú was translated into twelve languages, and was an influential factor in changing world opinion about support for the military. Fifteen years later, discrepancies were found about certain details of the work, but there is no dispute regarding its essential truth and the massive suffering of Guatemala’s indigenous peoples at the hands of the hemisphere’s most brutal military government. In 1992, Rigoberta Menchú Tum won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work. Menchú has been forced into exile three times for her advocacy within Guatemala. Despite the threats, she continues her work today on human rights, indigenous rights, women’s rights, and development. In 1993 she was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. She has been active in trying to attain justice for the genocide of Guatemala, pursuing claims today in Spanish courts due to her country’s legacy of impunity for those in power.
Blueprint for Peace
One of the architects of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, an agreement between Israel and Palestine, Shimon Peres has been involved in the government of Israel since 1952. During his long political career he held many cabinet positions, including Prime Minister. In 2007, the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, elected Peres as its President.
Born in Poland in 1923, Peres spent the formative years of his youth under the tutelage of his grandfather, Rabbi Zvi Meltzer, where he learned the Talmud and followed Haredi Judaism, which is the most conservative form of Orthodox Judaism. In 1934, Peres and his family moved to Tel Aviv, which was still part of Palestine. During World War II, all of Peres’ remaining relatives in Poland were killed for their religious beliefs.
Peres began his career in government when he was appointed Deputy Director-General of the Ministry of Defense in 1952. He became a Member of the Knesset, Israel’s legislative body in 1959, but is perhaps best known for his work as Israel’s Foreign Minister starting in 1986.
As foreign minister, Shimon Peres participated in 14 separate meetings in Oslo, Norway, with Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat negotiating a path to peace. Throughout the lengthy meetings, both sides stayed in the same residence and often shared meals together, leading to a growing bond between the people involved. The Oslo Peace Accords were eventually signed by both sides on September 13, 1993 at the White House in Washington, D.C.
The Nobel Peace Prize 1994 was awarded jointly to Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East. In his Nobel acceptance speech Peres stated that "classical diplomacy and strategy were aimed at identifying enemies and confronting them. Now they have to identify dangers, global or local, and tackle them before they become disasters."
In 2007 Peres was chosen by Kadima, a centrist and liberal political party in Israel, to run for President. Peres was elected by the Knesset on June 13, 2007. He was sworn in as President on July 15, 2007 for a seven-year term. He is the first former Prime Minister to be elected President of Israel. He continues to work on building a peaceful future as the President of Israel.
Human Rights for All
A prominent lawyer and former judge, Shirin Ebadi founded the Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran to increase the rights of women and children and protect prisoners of conscience and those accused of political crimes. Ebadi has seen how women are frequently mistreated in Iran and has personally faced discrimination, threats of imprisonment and exile for her human rights work.
At the young age of 22, Ebadi was appointed one of the first female judges in Iran. She was poised to become a Chief Justice until the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown in a revolution and succeeded by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Khomeini created a conservative theocracy where women and minorities would not have equal rights. As a result, Ebadi and all of her fellow female judges were dismissed from their positions and, in some cases, re-assigned to lower posts. Ebadi was re-assigned to a clerical position in the courtroom where she once presided. She requested early retirement and established a private practice dedicated to defending political dissidents and women and children. Her defiance resulted in multiple arrests, but also cemented her place as one of the most prominent lawyers in Iran and international recognition as a human rights defender.
In 2003, Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to promote human rights, especially the rights of women, children, and political prisoners in Iran. She is the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and only the fifth Muslim to receive a Nobel Prize in any field.
Shirin Ebadi also established numerous non-governmental organizations in Iran including the Million Signatures Campaign to end legal discrimination against women in Iran. Along with fellow Nobel laureate Jody Williams, Ebadi founded the Nobel Women’s Initiative in 2006, to engage female Nobel laureates in a united effort for peace and justice. Other Nobel Laureats involved in founding the Nobel Women's Initiative include Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Wangari Maathai, Mairead Maguire, and Aung San Suu Kyi. Ebadi has published numerous articles and books concerning human rights in Iran that have been translated into 14 languages around the world.
What does free expression mean?
Vaclav Havel is one of democracy’s most principled voices. Armed with a moral compass that points true north, and an eloquence unsurpassed in the political arena, Havel speaks with the honesty of a dissident from the halls of the presidential palace in Prague. Czechoslovakia’s leading playwright and a perennial victim of state repression under Communist rule, he is celebrated for his absurdist plays including The Garden Party, The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, The Memorandum, Largo Desolato, and Temptation. Havel, who was born in 1936, was a founder of Charter 77, a human rights and democracy organization that challenged the Soviet takeover. He wrote compelling texts on repression and dissent, and his 1978 work, The Power of the Powerless, is one of the best political essays ever written. In his work, Havel continued to emphasize the important of freedom of thought. In 1979, in retaliation for his human rights activism, Havel was sentenced to four and a half years of hard labor, during which he wrote Letters to Olga.
As chief spokesperson of Civic Forum, which he cofounded in 1989, Havel, through his leadership, political savvy, and moral persuasion helped bring Communism to its knees, and negotiated a peaceful transition to democracy. Out of the ashes of Soviet control emerged a new state, based on free expression, political participation, civil society, and commitment to the rule of law. In 1989, Havel was elected the first non-Communist president of Czechoslovakia in over forty years. In 2002, he was the third recipient of the Hanno R. Ellenbogen Citizenship Award presented by the Prague Society for International Cooperation. In 2003 he was awarded the International Gandhi Peace Prize, named after Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi by the government of India for his outstanding contribution towards world peace and upholding human rights in most difficult situations through Gandhian means. In 2003, Havel was the inaugural recipient of Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award for his work in promoting human rights. Also in 2003, he received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and in 2008, the Europe-based A Different View cited Havel as one of the 15 Champions of World Democracy along with Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, and Corazon Aquino.
Vaclav Havel, a dissident playwright from Czechoslovakia who led a revolution that brought democracy to central Europe, died December 18th, 2011 at the age of 75.
Who do you think is protecting you?
Van Jones is the founding director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Founded in 1996 and named for an unsung civil rights heroine, the Center challenges human rights abuses in the U.S. criminal justice system. A project of the Ella Baker Center, Bay Area Police Watch is committed to stopping police misconduct and protecting victims of abuse. Police Watch takes a multifaceted approach, combining advocacy with public education and community organizing. Staff work directly with individuals who have suffered police harassment, intimidation, and brutality. Jones’s efforts to establish civilian oversight, and to require transparency and accountability within disciplinary proceedings, have yielded results. Jones’s efforts to ban the use of pepper spray, routinely used by police in subduing suspects, has helped launch a nationwide campaign against the chemical weapon.
The Police Watch Hotline documents callers’ complaints and refers victims to lawyers who are, in turn, trained by Police Watch in handling misconduct cases. Police Watch then helps victims and lawyers through legal proceedings, organizes community support, and advocates on behalf of victims to public officials and the media. Jones’s efforts have offered a corrective lesson that egregious abuses of human rights still take place even within the vaunted protection offered by the democratic laws of the United States. Jones is the author of The Green Collar Economy, the definitive book on “green jobs.” In 2008—thanks to a low-cost, viral marketing campaign—his book became an instant New York Times bestseller. Jones helped to pass America’s first “green job training” legislation, the Green Jobs Act, which George W. Bush signed into law as a part of the 2007 Energy Bill. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the Reebok International Human Rights Award; the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader designation; and the prestigious, international Ashoka Fellowship. Jones was included in the Ebony magazine “Power 150” list of most influential African-Americans for 2009. In 2008, Essence magazine named him one of the 25 most inspiring/influential African Americans. TIME magazine named him an environmental hero in 2008. In 2009, TIME named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. From March to September 2009, Jones worked as the special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council for Environmental Quality. His 2012 book Rebuild the Dream lists seven missteps made by the White House after Obama’s 2008 victory and suggests ways to turn anger into action.
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.
