AAmnesty advocate to lecture at Law School
By Daily Bruin Staff
Nov. 2, 2009 9:51 p.m.
Former Director of Amnesty International U.S.A. Jack Healey will hold a lecture Wednesday on the ongoing human rights violations in the country of Myanmar, previously known as Burma, and around the world.
The lecture, presented by the UCLA Burkle Center and titled “Burma and a Lifetime of Human Rights Advocacy,” will take place at noon in the UCLA School of Law and will bring the man called “Mr. Human Rights” by U.S. News and World Report to UCLA.
“(Healey has) been a part of the human rights movement for close to 50 years,” said Alexandra Lieben, deputy director of the Burkle Center. “He publicized human rights issues during a time where it was largely only in diplomatic circles.”
Healey, founder and head of the Human Rights Action Center, will arrive at UCLA in the midst of recent projects including the printing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in all passports. In addition to this work, Healey has been part of an ongoing effort to rightfully restore the winner of the 1990 Burmese elections, political prisoner and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi, to power ““ a topic of his upcoming lecture.
“(Burma) holds two or three thousand political prisoners at any given time,” Healey said. “They torture in prisons regularly.”
Yet the extent of the human rights violations do not end there, he said.
“They have child soldiers to the extent of 60 to 70 thousand,” Healey said. “More villages have been destroyed in Burma than in Darfur.”
But Healey’s lecture will not be solely focused on the southeast Asian nation.
“I’ll talk from the hip,” Healey said. “I’ll talk about human rights in general, especially the aspiration of human rights as well as the degradation of human rights.”
