altri argomenti
Ambiente
Attivismo non violento
Brutalita' della polizia
Bullismo
Combattere la poverta'
Diritti dei bambini
Diritto del lavoro
Genocidio
Lavoro forzato
Lavoro minorile
Liberta' di espressione e di credo
Liberta' politica
Partecipazione politica
Riconciliazione
Sanita' e acqua potabile
Schiavitu' e traffico di esseri umani
Violenza domestica
Free Expression & Religion
John Lewis
A Legacy of Leadership in Non-Violent Activism and Community Organizing for Social Change
Non-violence Political Participation Freedom of Expression Equality Justice Change Social Movements Compromise
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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.
Shirin Ebadi
Human Rights for All
Equality Torture Discrimination Personal Security
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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.
Vaclav Havel
Libera Espressione
Free Expression
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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.
Adolfo Perez Esquivel
Steward of Justice & Peace
Free Expression Religion Activism Non-violence
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Adolfo Pérez Esquivel was born in Argentina in 1931. Trained as an architect and sculptor, he left his career in 1974 at the age of 43 to coordinate non-violent organizations and coalitions in Latin America. Esquivel began a campaign to convince the United Nations of the need for a Human Rights Commission. He sent a record of all of the breaches of human rights that his organization, Servicio Paz y Justicia, “Service, Peace and Justice Foundation," could uncover in Latin America.
In 1977, Argentinean authorities jailed Pérez Esquivel without charge, subjected him to torture and held him without trial in Buenos Aires for fourteen months. It was his third arrest in as many years, each in a different country. After his release, his movements were restricted and he was closely monitored by the police. Over time these limits were eased and he was able to visit Europe in 1980.
For his leadership in the advocacy of human rights and democracy for the people of Latin America, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980. As he said in his Nobel acceptance speech, he continues to believe in, and work for, “a change based on justice, built with love and which will bring us the most anxiously desired fruit of peace.”
Mikhail Gorbachev
Free Expression, Free Elections, and Democratic Reforms
Free Expression Free Elections Peaceful Assembly
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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.
Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo
Promoting Change and Understanding Through Non-Violent Means
Genocide National Identity Independence Quality of LIfe
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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.
Rigoberta Menchú Tum
Indigenous Rights
Free Expression Indigenous Rights Torture Legal Protection Discrimination Property
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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.
Ethel Kennedy
Political Participation
Political Participation Human Rights
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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.
Mohamed ElBaradei
Nuclear Arms Control
Freedom of Expression Nuclear Non-Proliferation
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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.
Dalai Lama
Libertà Religiosa e diritto all’autodeterminazione
China Free Expression Religious Freedom
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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.
