Defender
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Digna Ochoa
Biography: One of the foremost human rights attorneys in Mexico, Digna Ochoa was also a nun. As defense attorney at PRODH (Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez, known as Centro Pro, or “the Pro”), Ochoa took on some of Mexico’s most politically charged cases, including the defense of alleged members of the Zapatista…
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Guillaume Ngefa Atondoko
Biography: Researching, recording, and exposing grave human rights abuses committed by Zaire’s notorious dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, Guillaume Ngefa risked his life on a daily basis. As founder and president of his country’s premier human rights organization, L’Association Africaine de Défense des Droits de l’Homme (African Association for the Defense of Human Rights, or ASADHO),…
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Wei Jingsheng
Biography: Wei Jingsheng came to symbolize the struggle for human rights and democracy in China, when, after the Cultural Revolution, he was among the first to demand a freer society. In spite of the threat of imprisonment, Wei spoke openly with the Western press, publishing articles demanding reform and comparing the policies of all-powerful Premier…
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Helen Prejean
Biography: Louisiana, 1977. Brothers Patrick and Eddie Sonnier admitted mugging David LeBlanc, age seventeen, and Loretta Bourque, eighteen, one autumn night, but each blamed the other for murdering them and raping Bourque. Eddie was sentenced to life, Patrick to death by electrocution. In the summer of 1982, Sister Helen Prejean had moved into St. Thomas…
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Patria Jimenez
Biography: Mexico’s first openly homosexual member of Congress, Patria Jiménez Flores was elected in 1998 at the age of forty-one. The ninth of ten children in a conservative Catholic family, Jiménez overcame her own family’s prejudices to confront the bigotry of society at large. She works on issues of homophobic violence, violations of basic rights,…
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Asma Jahangir And Hina Jilani
Biography: Threatened with death from the very halls of parliament when she called for the abolition of repressive shari‘a laws contravening constitutional protection of women, Asma Jahangir also put her life on the line in 1993 when she represented an illiterate fourteen-year-old sentenced to death for blasphemous graffiti on the side of a mosque. Muslim…
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Freedom Neruda
Biography: Journalism has become one of the world’s most dangerous professions, with dozens of deaths and hundreds imprisoned because they exercised their freedom of speech. Freedom Neruda exemplifies the extraordinary courage of these engaged journalists who report the news despite severe restrictions by the state. Born Teiti Roch D’Assomption in the Ivory Coast in 1956,…
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Oscar Arias Sánchez
Interview With Kerry Kennedy Three billion people live in tragic poverty, and forty thousand children die each day from diseases that could be prevented. In a world that presents such a dramatic struggle between life and death, the decisions we make about how to conduct our lives, about the kind of people we want to…
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Shirin Ebadi
Excerpts From Shirin Ebadi’s 2003 Nobel Peace Prize Lecture I feel extremely honoured that today my voice is reaching the people of the world from this distinguished venue. This great honour has been bestowed upon me by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. I salute the spirit of Alfred Nobel and hail all true followers of his…
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Juan Mendez
Biography: From the time that he worked as a lawyer in Argentina in the early 1970s helping to build the modern human rights movement, Juan Méndez created a road map for others to follow in defending political cases. When he was detained by the brutal Argentine security forces, his family moved quickly to demand his…
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Samuel Kofi Woods
Biography: Founding director of the foremost human rights organization in Liberia, the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, Sam Woods managed on a shoestring budget to write and distribute to the international community reliable reports of abuses in the midst of a brutal civil war. His work led to the liberation of more than fifty inmates…
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Jamie Prieto Mendez
Biography: Jaime Prieto Mendez is one of the leading figures in the Colombian human rights movement, serving from 1990 to 1998 as executive director of the Committee in Solidarity with Political Prisoners, the most effective advocates in the country for those imprisoned for political beliefs. For most of the past fifty years, Colombia has been…
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