Advocates of Human Rights

Three panelists bring unique points of view to a discussion of 21st century Africa. The President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is the first woman to serve as the elected leader of an African nation. The Harvard-trained economist survived death threats, exile and imprisonment in her 25-year struggle to bring peace and democracy to her country. Since her election in 2005, President Johnson Sirleaf has moved decisively to repair the damage done by decades of dictatorship and civil conflict. Her courage and tenacity have won her the nickname, the Iron Lady of Africa. Desmond Tutu received the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to the cause of racial equality in South Africa. As the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, his spiritual authority dealt a death blow to the system of white supremacy. As Chairman of the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he enabled his country to bind up its wounds, and choose forgiveness over revenge. One of the world's most beloved religious leaders, he continues to raise his voice for peace and justice all over the world. Author and journalist Nicholas Kristof has covered African affairs for over 20 years. He has reported on civil wars in Ghana and Congo and focused the world's attention on the continent's epidemics of AIDS and malaria. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary in 2006 for his columns exposing the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. The discussion, recorded at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Hawaii, is led by David Gergen, Director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Twice a week, millions of readers of The New York Times turn to Nicholas Kristof's column for firsthand insights into breaking news from around the world. His travels as a reporter have taken him to 140 countries, including multiple visits to hot spots such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea. In the course of his travels he has survived wars, plane crashes, malaria, and in Indonesia, a mob carrying human heads on pikes. He first joined the Times as an economics correspondent and has since served as the paper's bureau chief in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Beijing and as managing editor of the Sunday Times. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, shared the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for their coverage of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in China. Week after week, Kristof uses his column to illuminate issues of poverty, global health, and human rights violations. He believes in doing more than writing about the abuses he uncovers, personally intervening to buy the freedom of two enslaved women in Cambodia. The Pulitzer committee cited his eyewitness coverage of the ongoing genocide in Darfur in awarding him a second prize, for Distinguished Commentary, in 2006. In this podcast, recorded at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, Nicholas Kristof recounts his travels through the world's conflict zones, and his difficult effort to free two young women from slavery in Cambodia.

Elie Wiesel was only 15 when German troops deported him and his family from their home in Romania to the concentration camp, Auschwitz. His father, mother, and younger sister all died at the hands of the Nazis. The young boy survived forced labor, forced marches, starvation, disease, beatings and torture to become a world-renowned writer, teacher and spokesmen for the oppressed peoples of the earth. He is best known as the most eloquent witness to the great catastrophe to which he was the first to give the name "Holocaust." After the war, Elie Wiesel determined to relate his story to the world. His book Night is one of the classic accounts of the Holocaust. Since its publication, Elie Wiesel has written dozens of books, including novels, plays, books of essays, biblical commentary and works on Jewish folklore and mysticism. Throughout his career, he has continued to speak out for victims of oppression all the world over.

When Desmond Tutu became General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, he used his pulpit to decry the apartheid system of racial segregation. The South African government revoked his passport to prevent him from traveling, but Bishop Tutu refused to be silenced. International condemnation forced the government to rescind their decision. He had succeeded in drawing the world's attention to the injustice of the apartheid system. In 1984, his contribution to the cause of racial equality in South Africa was recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize. As Archbishop of Cape Town, spiritual leader of all Anglican Christians in South Africa, his spiritual authority dealt a death blow to white supremacy in South Africa. As Chairman of the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he helped his country to bind up its wounds, and choose forgiveness over revenge. Now retired from his episcopate, he continues to raise his voice for peace and justice all over the world.

For 50 years, Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) was one of the leading literary and political figures of the Spanish-speaking world. A giant of Latin America's literary boom of the 1960s and '70s, his novels, including the classics Terra Nostra, The Death of Artemio Cruz and The Old Gringo, are passionate explorations of the history and identity of the Latin American nations, and of their contentious relationship with the superpower to the north. The son of a Mexican diplomat, Fuentes spent much of his childhood in Washington, D.C., returning every summer to his grandmother's home in Mexico. As Mexico's best-known public intellectual, he served as Ambassador to France in the 1970s. His work was recognized with the most prestigious awards in Spanish letters, including the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, awarded by the King of Spain. He was the first recipient of the Latin Civilization Award, presented jointly by the Presidents of Brazil, Mexico and France. In 1992, he produced and narrated a documentary television series on the history of pan-Hispanic culture, The Buried Mirror. An independent political thinker with a profound instinct for social justice, Carlos Fuentes is one of those rare writers who, by the sheer power of his literary art, defined the cultural and emotional identity of an entire continent.

When Desmond Tutu became General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, he used his pulpit to decry the apartheid system of racial segregation. The South African government revoked his passport to prevent him from traveling, but Bishop Tutu refused to be silenced. International condemnation forced the government to rescind their decision. He had succeeded in drawing the world's attention to the injustice of the apartheid system. In 1984, his contribution to the cause of racial equality in South Africa was recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize. As Archbishop of Cape Town, spiritual leader of all Anglican Christians in South Africa, his spiritual authority dealt a death blow to white supremacy in South Africa. As Chairman of the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he helped his country to bind up its wounds, and choose forgiveness over revenge. Now retired from his episcopate, he continues to raise his voice for peace and justice all over the world.

"You mean to tell me that me, Toni Novello, the little kid from Puerto Rico who has been in the National Institutes of Health all her life has been picked?" When President George H.W. Bush tapped Dr. Antonia Novello to be Surgeon General from 1990 to 1993, she could hardly believe her ears. She was both the first woman and the first Latin American ever to serve as the nation's number one public health officer. She had come a long way from the little town of Fajardo, Puerto Rico, where her widowed mother had struggled to raise a child who was sick from birth. Overlooked in the public health system of her native island, Antonia waited 18 years for the operation that allowed her to live a normal life. Undaunted by illness, discomfort or hardship, she excelled in school and embarked on the study of medicine, determined to spare other children the neglect she had suffered for so long. Dr. Novello has specialized throughout her career in the health problems of children and adolescents. It was her work in pediatric AIDS that led to her appointment as Surgeon General. In that role, as representative of the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund, and as Commissioner of Health for the State of New York until 2007, Dr. Novello has been a tireless campaigner for children's health, and an inspiration to young men and women around the world.

A devout Muslim, Shirin Ebadi has long argued for an interpretation of Islamic law consistent with democracy and equality before the law. The first woman to serve as a judge in Iran, she was President of the City Court of Tehran from 1971 until the revolution of 1979, when the new Islamic regime barred women from serving as judges. For many years, the theocratic government would not even permit Dr. Ebadi to practice law. When she was finally granted a license to practice law, she courageously took on a series of human rights cases that set her at odds with the conservative authorities. She has championed writers and journalists in freedom of expression cases, and exposed conspirators behind the murder of dissident students and intellectuals. In one of her most famous cases, she represented a mother whose child was taken from her and died of abuse in the home of the custodial stepmother. Against fierce resistance, Dr. Ebadi led a successful campaign for the passage of Iran's first law criminalizing violence against children. Valuing her own faith as she does, Dr. Ebadi is also a committed proponent of religious freedom and has bravely defended the rights of Iran's Baha'i religious minority. The government has jailed her repeatedly, but her courage has never wavered. In 2003, she became the first citizen of Iran to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

For two months of his life Paul Rusesabagina held insanity at bay as he watched his country fall into the grips of genocide in 1994. A Hutu manager of a luxury hotel in Rwanda, he sheltered over 1,200 people, including his own Tutsi wife and children, saving their lives at a time when extremists massacred more than 800,000 members of the Tutsi tribe, along with more moderate Hutus, in just 100 days. His wrenching story is chronicled in the critically acclaimed film, Hotel Rwanda, a riveting account of a man finding courage within himself to save others in the midst of his country's darkest moment. When Rwanda descended into madness, Rusesabagina took action. While militants threatened and surrounded the hotel, he spent hours on the phone, pleading with influential leaders, his international connections his only defense against attack. He bartered luxury items -- such as money, gold, cigars, and aged bottles of wine he had hoarded in the hotel -- for the lives of strangers seeking refuge in the chaos. Miraculously, no one housed in the hotel died. As the world turned its back on the horrific tragedy, Rusesabagina was one man who saved few among the many lost. Through the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation, he supports the survivors of the genocide in Rwanda, and attempts to raise the world's awareness of similar horrors now unfolding in the Congo and in the Darfur region of Sudan.

"When I went to the movies with other black children, we had to sit in the balcony while the white kids got to sit in the better seats below. We had to walk to school while the white children rode in school buses paid for by our parents' taxes. Such messages, saying we were inferior, were a daily part of our lives." Young Coretta Scott's gift for music and enthusiasm for education led her far beyond the segregated world of her childhood, but when she met the young Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the two resolved to return to the Deep South together and pursue the cause of justice in her own home state of Alabama. The Montgomery bus boycott thrust the young couple to the forefront of a revitalized civil rights movement, even as it exposed their growing family to the retaliation of those who opposed any change in the old system. Braving death threats and surviving the bombing of their home by white supremacists, Coretta Scott King stood by the cause and her husband, from the Birmingham jail to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, from the March on Washington, to a stage in Oslo, Norway where he accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace. After his assassination, she inspired the world with her courage, dignity and tireless devotion to preserving Dr. King's legacy. As founding President, Chair, and Chief Executive Officer of The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, she saw that tens of thousands of activists from all over the world were trained in the philosophy and practice of nonviolence. She has served as an advisor to freedom and democracy movements all over the world, and as a consultant to world leaders including President Corazon Aquino of the Philippines, President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, and President Nelson Mandela of South Africa. Coretta Scott King died on January 30th, 2006. One of the world's most admired women, she remained an outspoken champion of justice and human dignity to the end of her days.