People
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Berenice Celeita Alayon
Tags Share Berenice Celeita Alayon attributes the beginning of her human rights activism to the 1985 Palace of Justice siege in which M-19 guerrillas took the Supreme Court of Colombia hostage, killing 11 of its 25 justices. At the time Celeita was a freshman in college and lost several of her professors. She later founded…
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Archbishop Michael Kpakala Francis
Tags Share Following the wreckage of Liberia’s first civil war, Archbishop Michael Kpakala Francis became a vital voice for positive change, calling upon the international community to help keep peace, reconstruct the nation, and usher Liberia towards democracy. His organizations, the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission and Radio Veritas, have worked with Robert F. Kennedy…
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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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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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Anonymous
Tags Share “Courage means a lot of things to me: it means commitment, it means hope. It means thinking first of others. It means a strong belief in human rights, a strong belief in the power of the people, and it means turning our backs on the power of the rulers. Courage will bring change…
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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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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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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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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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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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