School Specialty. Planning & Student Development

Human rights education first establishes an understanding of respect for self, parents, teachers and others. The next steps include social responsibility, citizenship and distinguishing wants and needs from rights. At the middle school level, students dig deeper as they are introduced to specific human rights issues.

This guide includes powerful profiles and interviews of people who are defenders of human rights.

Defender Profiles and Interviews

• AMERICAS: Lucas Benitez, U.S. — Labor Rights

  As a farmworker, Benitez helped found Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and has become a leader in the fight to end slave labor, human trafficking and exploitation in agriculture fields across the U.S.

• AMERICAS: Loune Viaud, Haiti — Health Care

  Although the Haitian Constitution guarantees the right to health and education, ineffective international assistance meant that the government of Haiti lacked the resources to either educate its people or effectively care for their health. Viaud's primary concern has been to address the flow of international donor and loan funds into Haiti, because the lack of coordination with local entities undermined the Haitian government's ability to fulfill its human rights obligations.

• EUROPE: Vaclav Havel, Czech Republic — Free Expression

  Vaclav Havel is one of democracy's most principled voices. Havel speaks with the honesty of a dissident from the halls of the presidential palace in Prague. Czechoslovakia's leading playwright and a perennial victim of state repression under communist rule, he founded human rights and democracy organizations that challenged the Soviet takeover. He wrote compelling texts on repression and dissent, and through his leadership, political savvy and moral persuasion helped bring communism to its knees, and negotiated a peaceful transition to democracy. In 1989, Havel was elected the first non-Communist president of Czechoslovakia in more than 40 years. He has won numerous international awards for his work in promoting human rights.

• EUROPE: Gabor Gombos, Hungary — Mental Disabilities Rights

  Throughout the world, people with mental disabilities, elders with dementia, and people of all ages who suffer from psychological illnesses are regularly abandoned to a life of discrimination. They are often locked away in insane asylums where degrading conditions include pervasive inactivity, filthy spaces and the use of physical restraints, including confinement to cages. Gombos knows these conditions all too well. He was confined four times to psychiatric wards in Hungarian hospitals. He emerged determined to overhaul psychiatric care, first in his country and then across Europe.

• AFRICA: Wangari Maathai, Kenya — Environment

  Wangari Maathai is Kenya's foremost environmentalist and women's rights advocate. She founded the Green Belt Movement on Earth Day in 1977, encouraging farmers (70 percent of whom were women) to plant "greenbelts" to stop soil erosion, provide shade and create a source of lumber and firewood. Persisting through governmental oppression, violence threats and unexpected beatings, Maathai continued her work for environmental protection, women's rights and democratic reform. In 2004, Maathai received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her efforts, and in 2005, she was selected to preside over the African Union's Economic, Social and Cultural Council.

• AFRICA: Desmond Tutu, South Africa — Reconciliation

  Archbishop Desmond Tutu's work confronting the bigotry and violence of South Africa's apartheid system won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. After South Africa's first democratic, nonracial elections in 1994, effectively ending 80 years of white minority rule, the new parliament created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, appointing Tutu as its head to lead his country in an agonizing and unwavering confrontation of the brutality of the past.

• AFRICA: Hafez Abu Sayed Seada, Egypt — Political Rights

  Established in 1985 under Hafez Abu Sayed Seada's leadership, the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights investigates, monitors and reports on violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Seada defends victims; strives to create understanding of, and popular support for, the defense of human rights; and works to change laws and government practices that violate international instruments. He has launched numerous campaigns against specific violations, including torture, female genital mutilation, inhumane prison conditions and religious persecution.

• ASIA: Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh — Right to Credit

  Founder of the Grameen Bank, the world's largest and most successful microcredit institution, Muhammad Yunus was born in one of the poorest places on earth, the country (then part of Pakistan) of Bangladesh. As a professor of economics, he was struck by the discrepancy between the economic theory taught in universities and the abject poverty around him. He started experimenting with small, collateral-free loans to landless rural peasants and impoverished women. Among many awards, Dr. Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. Yunus is also a member of the "Global Elders" group.

• ASIA: Kailash Satyarthi, India — Child Labor

  Kailash Satyarthi is India's lodestar for the abolition of child labor. Since 1980, he has led the rescue of more than 75,000 bonded and child slaves in India and developed a successful model for their education and rehabilitation. Satyarthi has faced false charges and death threats for his work; two of his colleagues have been murdered. Satyarthi organized and led two great marches across India to raise awareness about child labor. On the global stage, he orchestrated the largest civil society network for exploited children, the "Global March Against Child Labor," active in more than 140 countries. He has been recognized as a hero acting to end modern-day slavery.

• ASIA: Dalai Lama, Tibet — Free Expression, Worship

  The ninth child born to a farming family in the Chinese border region of Amdo in 1935, 2-year-old Lhamo Thondup was recognized by Tibetan monks as the 14th reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, considered a manifestation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Renamed Tenzin Gyatso, he was brought to Lhasa to begin a 16-year education in metaphysical and religious texts to prepare him for his role as spiritual leader. The Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1949, and its aftermath, introduced brutal repressions that continue today. His life in jeopardy, the Dalai Lama fled into exile in northern India along with 80,000 Tibetans in 1959, where he has remained. His Holiness has received 84 awards, honorary doctorates, and other prizes in recognition of his lifelong message of peace, nonviolence interreligious understanding, universal responsibility and compassion including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

Human rights education first establishes an understanding of respect for self, parents, teachers and others. The next steps include social responsibility, citizenship and distinguishing wants and needs from rights. At the high school level, grades 9–12, the focus expands to include human rights as universal standards, integration of human rights into personal awareness, and behavior.

This guide includes powerful profiles and interviews of people who are defenders of human rights.

Defender Profiles and Interviews

• AMERICAS: Marian Wright Edelman, U.S. — Children and Poverty

  Marian Wright Edelman is the founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), the foremost children's advocacy organization in the United States. After graduating from Spelman College, where she joined civil rights protests, she went on to Yale Law School and later became the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi bar. While working for the NAACP, she and co-workers were regularly harassed, intimidated and threatened for their civil rights work. In 1968, Edelman was a major force behind the Poor People's March, the last great campaign of Martin Luther King, Jr., when tens of thousands of Americans descended on Washington, D.C., demanding respect for their rights.

• AMERICAS: Juan Méndez, Argentina — Human Rights and Reconciliation

  Juan Méndez worked as a lawyer in Argentina in the early 1970s and helped create a road map for others to follow in defending political cases. He was detained by brutal Argentine security forces and was subjected to particularly harsh torture. Méndez became one of Amnesty International's first Prisoners of Conscience in Argentina; advocates and diplomats alike pressured the junta, which forced Argentina to release him in 1977. In exile, Méndez continued his human rights work, pioneering advocacy tools that are the basis of much international human rights work today.

• EUROPE: Marina Pisklakova, Russia — Domestic Violence

  Marina Pisklakova is Russia's leading women's rights activist. Because of her efforts, Russian officials started tracking domestic abuse and estimate that, in a single year, close to 15,000 women were killed and 50,000 were hospitalized, while only one-third to one-fifth of all battered women received medical assistance. She is now active not only in combating the scourge of violence against women, but also in trafficking of women and children. In 2004, she was the recipient of the Human Rights Global Leadership Award. Pisklakova's efforts have saved countless lives, at great risk to her own.

• EUROPE: Elie Wiesel, Romania — Genocide

  Elie Wiesel was brought up in a closely knit Jewish community in Sighet, Transylvania (Romania). When he was 15 years old, his family was herded aboard a train and deported by Nazis to the Auschwitz death camp. Wiesel's mother and younger sister died at Auschwitz; two older sisters survived. Wiesel and his father were then taken to Buchenwald, where his father also perished. Wiesel has devoted his life to ensuring that the world does not forget the atrocities of the Nazis, and that they are not repeated. In 1986, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

• AFRICA: Anonymous, Sudan — Political Freedom

  In 2000, Freedom House, an organization based in Washington, D.C., described the dire state of repression in Sudan, so perilous for human rights that it was the only place in the world where this rights defender has been kept anonymous: "The Sudanese government and its agents are bombing, burning, and raiding southern villages, enslaving thousands of women and children, kidnapping and forcibly converting Christian boys, by sending them to the front as cannon fodder, annihilating entire villages or relocating them into concentration camps called 'peace villages,' while preventing food from reaching starving villages. Individual Christians, including clergy, continue to be imprisoned, flogged, tortured, assassinated, and even crucified for their faith." Against all odds, and under threat of certain brutal torture and death, this human rights defender spread the word of liberty, offering Sudanese compatriots a path to a better future.

• AFRICA: Juliana Dogbadzi, Ghana — Slavery/Trafficking

  Juliana Dogbadzi, enslaved in a shrine in her native Ghana as a young child under a custom known as Trokosi, was forced to work without pay, food or clothing, and to perform sexual services for the holy man. She was able to escape 17 years later, after several failed attempts, at the age of 23. In 1997, it was estimated that approximately 5,000 young girls and women were being kept in 345 shrines in the southeastern part of Ghana. Dogbadzi continues to speak out against Trokosi, traveling the country, meeting with slaves, and trying to win their emancipation.

• AFRICA: Abubacar Sultan, Mozambique — Children's Rights

  The war in Mozambique (1985–1992) left 250,000 children displaced and 200,000 orphaned, while tens of thousands more were forcibly recruited and put into combat. In the midst of the brutality, Abubacar Sultan traveled the country to rescue the children of war—kids, 6 to 13 years old, who had been forced to witness and, in some cases, commit atrocities against family members and neighbors. Sultan trained more than 500 people in community-based therapies and his project reunited more than 4,000 children with their families.

• ASIA: Kek Galabru, Cambodia — Political Participation

  Kek Galabru played a key role in the peace accords ending the civil war in 1991 and elections held under the auspices of the United Nations. Galabru founded the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO), which promotes human rights with a special emphasis on women's and children's rights, monitors violations, and disseminates educational information about rights. The organization monitors abuses and provides medical care, legal aid and advocacy to victims. In 2005, Galabru was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as part of the 1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize project.

• ASIA: Rana Husseini, Jordan — Honor Killings

  Rana Husseini broke the silence and exposed the shame of Jordan when she unveiled the common but unspoken crime of honor killings there. Honor killings happen when a woman is raped or is said to have participated in illicit sexual activity. Fathers, brothers and sons see it as their duty to avenge the offense, not by pursuing the perpetrators but by murdering the victims—their own daughters, sisters or mothers. Honor killings accounted for one-third of the murders of women in Jordan in 1999. Husseini wrote a series of reports on the killings and launched a campaign to stop them.

• ASIA: Harry Wu, China — Forced Labor

  In the throes of a communist purge in the late 1950s, Harry Wu was labeled a counterrevolutionary and sentenced to a Chinese "labor reform" camp, known as laogai. There, he survived physical and psychological torture for 19 years. After his release, Wu accepted a position as an unpaid, visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned to China several times to document conditions in prisons and labor camps, and China placed him on its most-wanted list for his exposés. On his fifth trip, he was caught. A worldwide campaign finally led to his release. Wu founded The Laogai Research Foundation and frequently testifies on Capitol Hill about the latest abuses he has uncovered.

Provide world perspective. Speak Truth To Power helps students gain a deeper understanding of different groups and the relationships between those groups. Students develop critical understandings of real-life situations and question the barriers that prevent people from enjoying rights and freedoms.

Teach compassion. This guide encourages students to recognize others' struggles and to see those people as fellow humans who are seeking to meet their basic needs and respond to human rights violations. Students are prompted to reflect on values, such as justice, equality and fairness.

Treat others nicely. The guide includes methodologies that are democratic and participatory, further modeling human rights values. In claiming these human rights, everyone also accepts the responsibility not to infringe on the rights of others.

Create a better system. Advancing legislation that includes human rights in plans of action, curricula, pre and in-service education, training, assessment and accountability provides the political grounding for a human rights-based educational system.

Impart historical and geographical knowledge and reference. Explore the development of protected human rights from a historical perspective, as well as present-day declarations, conventions and covenants. Take a closer look at the continuing evolution of human rights and the factors that contribute to human rights abuse. In addition, this guide provides stories for every corner of the globe, helping students retain a mental map of the world they live in.

Instill social responsibility. Inspire people to integrate human rights principles into their individual lives and social institutions. Challenge and enable people to demand, support and defend human rights as a tool for sustainable social change.

Human rights are an everyday issue.

Speak Truth To Power, a project of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, is a multifaceted global initiative that uses the experiences of courageous defenders from around the world to educate students and others about human rights and urges them to take action.

Kerry Kennedy authored the book Speak Truth To Power and is a leader in human rights advocacy.