Defender
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Sonita Alizadeh
When Sonita Alizadeh was born in Afghanistan in 1996, the country was controlled by the Taliban. Daily life was dangerous, and her childhood was quite difficult. She was only 10 when her family tried to sell her to a man who wanted to marry her—a very common occurrence in too many countries around the world.…
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Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall was born in 1908, in Baltimore—his father was a railroad porter and his mother, a schoolteacher. One of his great-grandfathers had been taken as a slave from the Congo to Maryland, where he was eventually freed. Growing up in Baltimore, Marshall experienced the racial discrimination that shaped his future career. After graduating from…
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Tawakkol Karman
Tawakkol Karman was born in 1979 in Taiz, Yemen’s third largest city, often described as a place of learning in a conservative country. In 1990, she witnessed the unification of North and South Yemen, followed by a civil war in 1994 in which the North triumphed. This led to dissidence in the South, as the…
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Vaclav Havel
Václav Havel was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1936 to a wealthy, intellectual family that was active in culture and politics. He completed his required education in 1951, but the Communist government did not allow him to continue to study formally because of his bourgeois background. Instead, he apprenticed as a chemical laboratory assistant, took…
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Loune Viaud
Loune Viaud, Director of Operations and Strategic Planning at Zanmi Lasante (Partners in Health—Haiti), has worked with Robert F. Kennedy 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…
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Fred T. Korematsu
Fred T. Korematsu was a national civil rights hero. In 1942, at the age of 23, he refused to go to the government’s incarceration camps for Japanese Americans. After he was arrested and convicted of defying the government’s order, he appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1944, the Supreme Court…
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Juliana Dogbadzi
Interview with Kerry Kennedy I have never been in a classroom. I have never been to school. When I was seven years old, my parents took me from our home and sent me to a shrine where I was a slave to a fetish priest for seventeen years. My grandfather, they said, had stolen two…
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Librada Paz
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.…
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Kek Galabru
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…
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José Ramos-Horta
Jose Ramos-Horta is famous for his uncompromising and indefatigable work on behalf of the people of East Timor, who were 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 a different language, religion, and customs, remained a colony until…
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Marina Pisklakova
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 that family violence had reached epidemic proportions. Because of her efforts, Russian officials started tracking domestic abuse and estimated that, in a single year, close to 15,000…
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Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela is one of the world’s most revered statesmen, who led the struggle to replace the apartheid regime of South Africa with a multiracial democracy. Jailed for 27 years, he emerged to become the country’s first black President and to play a leading role in the drive for peace in other spheres of conflict.…
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