Mois : novembre 2005

Linked with Centrality of Human Rights.

Rikke Frank Joergensen is a senior advisor at the Danish Institute for Human Rights in Copenhagen. She is a civil society representative in the Danish government delegation to the World Summit on the Information Society.

Rikke Frank Jørgensen

She is a co-founder of Digital Rights Denmark and of the European Digital Rights Initiative (EDRi) and is coordinating the human rights caucus of international civil society for the summit. Rikke holds a Master in Information Science and a European Master in Human Rights and Democratization, specializing in Internet and freedom of expression.

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Ethics of goods in times of starvation: Weyma Lübbe studies the ethics of distribution of live saving goods, when ones have to decide who may survive by getting access to this life saving goods.

Weyma Lübbe

Examples: food in times of starvation, medical goods (not enough Tamiflu for a whole population) during a pandemic disease, access to transport in times of danger (transports out of New Orleans), and so on.

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A physicist by profession, Vinod is one of the pioneers of the People’s Science Movement in India, having helped set up the All-India People’s Science Network (AIPSN) and the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti (BGVS).

Vinod Raina

He is a founding member of Eklavya, an organization advocating alternative education for more than two decades, and the only NGO whose curriculum was adopted in the state school educational system.

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Shari Eppel, the Executive Director of Amani Trust, was born in Zimbabwe and has lived there her entire life. Amani Trust, based in Bulawayo Zimbabwe, was established in 1997 to deal with the many thousands of survivors of institutionalised violence around Zimbabwe, in particular, the civilian survivors of both the liberation war and, in the case of Matabeleland, the survivors of the 1980s atrocities in which over 20,000 people were killed.

Shari Eppel – Zimbabwe

Eppel has been involved with human rights work in the anti-apartheid movement since the late seventies and early eighties during her university days in South Africa. She belonged to the Detainees Parent Support Committee through the Psychology Department, where she used to offer psychological support to the parents of people in detention.

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About Bagdad he said on october 10: Out in the streets where few of us go is hell on Earth. I managed to get, a couple of weeks ago, to the mortuary in the city of Baghdad. As I often go in the past, counting the bodies of midday and midsummer out in the heat.

Robert Fisk – Great Britain

There were 26 by midday. Nine had arrived by nine in the morning. I managed to get the official figures for July for the total number of violent deaths in Baghdad alone. The figure was 1,100 violent deaths, men, women and children. Shot, butchered, knifed, executed, death squad killings. A figure which, of course is not given out by the Iraqi Health Ministry and certainly not by the occupational authorities.

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Human rights activist Harry Wu is one of the world’s leading human-rights dissidents out of China. When had been expelled from China after being convicted of spying and sentenced him to 15 years in jail, said he would have starved himself to death if Chinese authorities had made him serve a jail sentence.

Harry Wu – China & USA

He had decided to go on hunger strike if Chinese authorities made him serve any of the jail term rather than deporting him. I decided if they put me in the jail even one month or two months or three months (and were) not going to deport me, I decided to have a hunger strike unto the death, Wu said. That’s the only choice: freedom or death, Wu told a news conference when coming back to the USA.

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From the inhumane treatment of inmates at California’s Pelican Bay prison to the annihilation of dolphins by tuna harvesters, Judge Thelton Henderson has heard countless abuses of power and has consistently ruled on the side of justice.

Thelton Henderson – USA

A quietly eloquent man of unsurpassed character, Henderson was the first black attorney recruited for the Civil Rights Division of Robert F. Kennedy’s Department of Justice, and was appointed to the federal bench in 1980.

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Born on 20 May 1950 in Beijing, into a family of loyal Communist Party members with connections to many of the top party leaders. His father holds a high-ranking job in the Foreign Ministry. Wei is the eldest of four children. He is educated in elite Communist Party schools and grows up to be a committed Maoist.

Wei Jingsheng – China

1968 – The militant phase of the Cultural Revolution comes to an end towards the middle of the year when Mao reassesses the usefulness of revolutionary violence.

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Dr. Hernan M. Reyes, M.D., General Surgery, Pediatric Surgery, Medical Coordinator for Detention-Related Activities, ICRC.

Hernan Reyes M.D. – Chile, New York and Geneva

Hernan Reyes, MD is a trained obstetrician/gynaecologist from Geneva University, the author subsequently specialized in the medical aspects of detention. He has been a medical coordinator for the ICRC’s detention-related activities since 1984.

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Albie Sachs is a Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. He was appointed in 1994 by President Mandela in the wake of South Africa’s first democratic elections. He had been living in exile in Mozambique and had been targeted by South African agents for being an activist South African lawyer and a leading member of the African National Congress (ANC) at the time of the incident.

Albie Sachs – South Africa

Author of many books on human rights, Albie (Albert Louis) Sachs, obtained his BA and LL.B degrees at the University of Cape Town where he was arrested for taking part in Passive Resistance Campaigns. He started practicing as an Advocate at the Cape Town Bar in 1957 working mainly in the civil rights sphere until his detentions without trial by the Security Police.

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