People

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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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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Tags Share Jaime Prieto Mendez is a leading figure in the Colombian human rights movement. Prieto began his career as a teacher in a poor area of Bogotá. Feeling that lack of “human rights literacy” increased the abuses against the poor, he began a human rights education program for which he was later imprisoned. In…

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Tags Share Gloria Florez is a Colombian activist on behalf of displaced persons. She is the head of MINGA, an “Association for Alternative Social Policy”. In 2004, MINGA advocated on behalf of the people of the Catatumbo region, 30,000 of whom were displaced following heavy fighting.

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Tags Share Mario Calixto was the President of the Human Rights Committee of Sabana de Torres in the 1990s and was repeatedly threatened by paramilitary groups for his denunciation of their activities. As of 1988 he has been living in exile in Spain.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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