People
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Sezgin Tanrikulu
Tags Share 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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Senal Sarihan
Tags Share Senal Sarihan was once sentenced to 22 years in prison for exercising her right to freedom of expression. As a member of the Executive Committee of the Turkish Teachers Commission, she wrote pro-union articles for the commission’s monthly newspaper. These writings caught the attention of Turkey’s military regime, and in 1971 she was…
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Doan Viet Hoat
Tags Share When Doan Viet Hoat received his PhD from Florida State University in 1971, his hope was to return to Vietnam and concentrate on upgrading Saigon’s Van Hah University into a modern, world-class university. Vietnam had other plans. In 1976, Hoat was imprisoned as part of a mass arrest of intellectuals. For the next…
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Nguyen Dan Que
Tags Share Dr. Nguyen Dan Que has faced multiple arrests, imprisonment, and constant surveillance for his nonviolent human rights work. But none of it has deterred him from promoting democracy in Vietnam. After his 1978 detention for criticizing Vietnam’s political system, he founded the High Tide Humanist movement, which works to promote human rights in…
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Kailash Satyarthi
Tags Share On Kailash Satyarthi’s first day of school, he encountered a boy his age sitting at the school’s gates. But instead of preparing to study, he was shining shoes. When Kailash asked his teachers why the boy was working instead of attending school, they had no answer. When Kailash ginned up the courage to…
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Ren Wanding
Tags Share Ren Wanding played a role in two separate pro-democracy movements in China, a decade apart: the 1978 protests around the Democracy Wall and the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement. His writing champions transparency and freedom of speech, and criticizes the Chinese government for failing to deliver the rights guaranteed in its constitution. For his…
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Bambang Widjojanto
Tags Share The indigenous people of West Papua, a province of Indonesia, are under constant assault. West Papuans have seen their lands occupied by the Indonesian military presence and despoiled by the American mining company Freeport-McMoRan. With that company exploiting the region for copper and gold, things might seem hopeless for the indigenous people of…
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Raji Sourani
Tags Share Raji Sourani founded the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), which lobbies for legislation that incorporates international human rights standards and basic democratic principles. Since its establishment in 1995, PCHR has become the foremost human rights organization in the Gaza Strip, serving as an independent legal body in Gaza that documents and investigates…
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Chakufwa Chihana
Tags Share Exile, imprisonment, and torture failed to stop Chakufwa Chihana from pursuing his dream of democracy and workers’ rights in Malawi. He began his activism when he was promoted to Secretary-General of the 4,000-strong Commercial General Union; at the time, Chihana was just 21. A longtime critic of Kamuza Banda’s three-decade dictatorial rule of…
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Avigdor Feldman
Tags Share A noted Israeli human and civil rights attorney, Avigdor Feldman has litigated countless human rights cases and spoken out against his country’s violations of its own laws and values. During its occupation of the Palestinian territories, the Israeli government has at times resorted to torture, arbitrary detentions, and extrajudicial assassinations against Palestinian leaders…
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Amílcar Méndez Urizar
Tags Share Amílcar Méndez Urizar became a prominent advocate for human rights in Guatemala in the 1980s. In July 1988 he helped to found the Comunidades Etnicas Runujel Junam (CERJ) (in English: “Council for Ethnic Communities ‘We Are All Equal’”), a group that documented human rights violations against Guatemala’s indigenous population. He also directed the…
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Fang Lizhi
Tags Share “Just as scientific research was a way of bearing witness to truths about the natural world, so, Fang believed, intellectual and political inquiry were ways of bearing witness to truths about the political and social world.” –Orville Schell Throughout his career, physicist Fang Lizhi (1936-2012) fearlessly criticized the Chinese Communist Party for the…
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