Mary
Robinson the first woman President of Ireland
(1990-1997) and more recently United Nations High Commissioner
for Human Rights (1997-2002), has spent most of her life as
a human rights advocate. She is the superb example of a woman
politician who puts her humanity very much at the forefront
of her politics. She now chairs the Council of Women World
Leaders and is a member of the Global Commission on International
Migration. As an academic, legislator and barrister, she has
always sought to use law as an instrument for social change,
arguing landmark cases before the European Court of Human Rights
as well as in the Irish courts and the European Court in Luxembourg.
In 1988 Mary Robinson and her husband, Nicholas Robinson, founded
the Irish Centre for European Law at the University of Dublin,
and since 1998 she has been Chancellor of the University.
Based in New York, President Robinson is currently
leading the Ethical Globalization Initiative (EGI), supported
by a partnership of the Aspen Institute, Columbia University
(where she is a professor of practice) and the Swiss based International
Council on Human Rights Policy. Its goal is to bring the norms
and standards of human rights into the globalization process
and to support capacity building in good governance in developing
countries. President Robinson was educated at the University
of Dublin (Trinity College), King's Inns Dublin, and Harvard
Law School to which she won a fellowship in 1967. She holds honorary
doctorates from over 40 universities around the world, including
Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Oxford, Cambridge, London and
Edinburgh.
Davar
Ardalan is responsible for producing NPR's
Morning Edition LIVE each day. With nearly 13 million listeners,
Morning Edition draws public radio's largest audience, Monday
through Friday on more than 600 NPR stations across the United
States, and around the globe and on NPR's international services.
Prior to her job on the morning show Ardalan was a producer
on Weekend All Things Considered. From breaking news to documentary-style
features, Ardalan's productions are among the signature pieces
heard on NPR. Ardalan's work has covered a wide array of topics
- including a series on girls and gangs in NY, the FBI's investigation
of Iraqi-Americans, 25 years of gambling in Atlantic City,
and an exploration of Islam in cyberspace. In April of 2002
she received a Gracie award from the American Women in Radio
and Television with Jacki Lyden for the documentary "Loss
and Its Aftermath," the story of Israeli and Palestinian
parents speaking about the death of their children in the conflict.
Ardalan has lived in Iran under both the Shah's reign and that
of the Ayatollahs. In a three-part Morning Edition series produced
with American RadioWorks, she traces her personal journey and
Iran's struggle for a lawful society, 25 years after the 1979
Islamic Revolution. Ardalan earned her B.A. in Communications
and Journalism from the University of New Mexico. She was born
in San Francisco and has also lived and worked in Iran where
she was a television newscaster. Away from NPR, she is the
mother of four -- Saied, Samira, Aman, and Amir.
Dr.
Sima Samar was born in Ghazani, Afghanistan.
As a child in school, she learned what it meant to be a minority
in Pushtun-dominated Afghanistan. She is Hazara, one of the
most persecuted of the ethnic minorities in Afghanistan. She
obtained her degree in medicine in 1982 from Kabul University,
the first Hazara woman to do so. With other women, Dr. Samar
established her first hospital for women in 1987 and later
in 1989 established the Shuhada Organization, a non-governmental
and non-profit organization committed to the reconstruct-tion
and development of Afghanistan with special emphasis on the
empowerment of women and children. Under the rule of the Taliban
Dr. Samar refused to accept that women must be kept in purdah
(secluded from the public) and spoke out against the wearing
of the burqa (head-to-foot wrap). Dr. Samar was named deputy
premier deputy prime minister and minister for women's affairs
in the post-Taliban Afghan government. Samar was forced from
those positions by a threat campaign by Muslim fundamentalists.
Samar now chairs the Independent Afghanistan Human Rights Commission,
the first organization of its kind in the country. A pioneer
in the cause for women’s rights in war-stricken Afghanistan
for almost 20 years, she founded the Shuhada Organization in
1989. She opened her first hospital for women, staffed by women
in Quetta, Pakistan, where she had been living in exile. Shuhada
operates 12 clinics and four hospitals in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
all dedicated to the provision of health care to Afghan women
and girls. Dr. Samar is part of the international network Women
Living Under Muslim Laws, which has links in 40 countries and
a powerful voice at the United Nations. She received the prestigious
Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 1984 and
in 2001 she received the John Humphrey Freedom Award.
Frances
Moore Lappe' is
a prolific author and global citizen who started a revolution
in the way that Americans eat with her first book Diet for
a Small Planet (1971). Today, vegetarianism and "the politics
of food" is at the center of a growing environmental movement
confirming Lappe’s philosophy that food is the central
issue through which to understand world politics. Her books
have been used in a broad array of courses in hundreds of colleges
and universities and in more than 50 countries. They have been
translated into over a dozen languages. In 2003 she received
the Rachel Carson Award from the National Nutritional Foods
Association. Lappé’s book awards include the World
Hunger Media Award and the Henry George Award as well as, in
2003, the Nautilus Award for Hope’s Edge in the category
of social change from NAPRA, the network of alternative publishers
and retailers. She was also chosen in 2003 by artist Robert
Shetterly as one of 50 Americans to be part of his traveling
portrait exhibition, Americans Who Tell the Truth. Lappe’s
most recent book, You Have the Power: Choosing Courage in a
Culture of Fear (2004) challenges seven old, limiting ideas
about fear and offers – through stories of real people – seven
freeing ideas.
Terje Rød-Larsen (b.
1947) taught sociology and philosophy at the University of Oslo
and University
of Bergen before establishing the Fafo Institute for Applied Social
Sciences in 1981. As Director of Fafo, he initiated a research
project into the living conditions of Palestinians in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip. The relationships that he established with
both Palestinians and Israelis during the period of preparing and
implementing this project led to a request by the PLO in 1992 that
he help establish a secret channel for negotiations between the
PLO and the Government of Israel. Those negotiations concluded
with the signing of the Declaration of Principles at the White
House on 13 September 1993.
Rød-Larsen has also served as
Ambassador and Special Adviser to the Norwegian Foreign Minister
for the Middle East Peace process;
United Nations Under-Secretary-General, Special Co-ordinator
in the Occupied Territories (Gaza); and Norwegian Minister of Planning.
In 1999 he was appointed United Nations Special
Co-ordinator for the Middle East Peace Process and the Personal
Representative
of the Secretary-General
to the PLO and the Palestinian Authority. He also serves as Honorary Chair
of the Programme for International Co-operation and Conflict Resolution
at the Oslo-based Fafo Institute.
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2008. Augsburg College. All rights reserved.
