Defender
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Rana Husseini
Biography Journalist, feminist, and human rights defender, Rana Husseini broke the silence and exposed the shame of Jordan when she unveiled the common but unspoken crime of honor killings there. Honor killings happen when a woman is raped or is said to have participated in illicit sexual activity. Across the globe, women who are beaten,…
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Dianna Ortiz
Biography Dianna Ortiz is an Ursuline nun from New Mexico who journeyed to Guatemala in the early 1980s as a missionary, teaching Mayan children in the highlands. After months of receiving threats, Ortiz was abducted and brutally raped by armed men in November 1989. One of the men overseeing the torture appeared to be American.…
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Natasa Kandic
Biography: In 1991 the cessation of Slovenia triggered the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia into the republics of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Kosovo. Led by the ethnic cleansing policies of Croatian dictator Tudjman and the Serbian Milosevic, efforts to consolidate territory along ethnic lines were systematized and enforced, using concentration camps,…
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Fauziya Kassindja
Biography: Fauziya Kassindja narrowly escaped female genital mutilation by fleeing from her remote village in Togo under cover of night and making her way to the United States where, in December 1994, she sought political asylum. Instead of receiving this seventeen-year-old orphan with understanding and humanity, U.S. officials proceeded to strip her naked, put her…
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Baltasar Garzon
Biography: Judge Baltasar Garzón has made an illustrious career taking on powerful enemies, specializing in cases against government corruption, organized crime, terrorists, state antiterrorism units, and drug lords. In 1973 Augusto Pinochet led a bloody military coup against democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende of Chile. Pinochet’s seventeen-year reign of terror was characterized by human…
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Jose Zalaquett
Biography: José Zalaquett began his career as a founder of the modern human rights movement worldwide, campaigning while a law student for Salvador Allende. Upon Allende’s election as president of Chile in 1970, Zalaquett served a two-year term as cabinet minister, which he left for a post at the university. Shortly thereafter in 1973, General…
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Zbigniew Bujak
Biography: Zbigniew Bujak led the Solidarity underground in the Warsaw region from the imposition of martial law in 1981 until his arrest in 1986. Born in 1954 and trained as an electrical technician and soldier, Bujak became active in the opposition in 1978 while he was working at the Ursus tractor factory. After organizing a…
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Sezgin Tanrikulu
Biography: Sezgin Tanrikulu is the leading human rights attorney in Turkish Kurdistan, a strong advocate of legal reform and strengthening civil society. Co-founder of the Diyarbakir Human Rights Association, the Secretary of the Bar Association in Diyarbakir, and the regional representative of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, his work has taken him where few…
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Rigoberta Menchú Tum
Interview: Struggles for the rights of poor people, for dignity, for human life, seem to be very, very dark tunnels, but one should always try, in that struggle, to find some light and some hope. The most important thing to have is a great quantity of positive feelings and thoughts. Even though one can easily…
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Maria Teresa Tula
Biography: Maria Teresa Tula is a leader of the Co-Madres (Mothers of the Disappeared) of El Salvador, a group of impoverished, mostly illiterate women whose husbands or children were kidnapped or killed by death squads and government security forces during El Salvador’s bloody civil war. The 1980s conflict pitted leftist organizations and campesino farmer-based guerrillas…
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Francisco Soberon
Biography: Dawn arrived in Peru in January 1980 and with it, a sight the world has never imagined. All over the country, dead dogs hung from lampposts announcing the first actions of Sendero Luminoso—the Shining Path, a Marxist guerrilla organization whose war against Peru’s landed power oligarchy swept the country into a state of emergency…
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Bishop Wissa
Biography: The Coptic (Egyptian Christian) Church traces its roots to Saint Mark, who is believed to have established it in Alexandria in a.d. 64. Since that time, Copts have been at best grudgingly tolerated, but often persecuted outright in Egypt. Today, there are nearly ten million Copts living in Egyptian territory who face frequent harassment…
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