Human Rights

Senator Patrick Leahy Leahy, Champlain College student activists and a representative of Invisible Children discuss the KONY 2012 campaign, aimed at bringing African war criminal Joseph Kony to justice. A documentary on the issue, KONY 2012, has gone viral on the internet, netting nearly 50 million hits on YouTube since Monday, March 5. Leahy, chairman of the Senate’s budget panel for the State Department and Foreign Operations, is a longtime U.S. leader on issues relating to war crimes and criminals and the innocent victims of war and conflict. He recently included funding in the U.S. foreign aid budget to help Kony’s victims – many of them children -- and he has long supported efforts to capture Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which has terrorized the people of northern Uganda, the Congo and elsewhere in Central Africa for more than two decades. The victim assistance funding secured by Leahy will be discussed in Leahy’s annual budget hearing for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which will implement those efforts. Kony and his forces have kidnapped children and forced them to become soldiers and to kill and mutilate members of their own families. Adonga Quinto, a northern Ugandan who was kidnapped by the LRA, discusses his experiences. Also speaking, Sadie Stone, a Champlain College student who has joined the effort to bring Kony to justice.