People
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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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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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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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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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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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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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