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.

From the Champlain College Website:

John Bul Dau, recently named one of America's "Most Caring People," will be guest speaker at Champlain College's Martin Luther King Day observance on Monday, Jan. 18,  at 6 p.m. in Argosy Gymnasium in the IDX Student Life Center.

One of the storied "Lost Boys of Sudan," Dau is featured in Christopher Quinn's award-winning documentary, God Grew Tired of Us. Born in war-torn Sudan, Dau is one of 27,000 boys driven from their villages when the northern Arab government attacked the ethnic minority population of Southern Sudan in 1987. For the next five years, Dau led groups of displaced boys across Sudan for hundreds of miles facing starvation, disease, and violence. In 1992, he was placed in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya where he learned his ABCs and 123's at the age of 17. In 2001, Dau was selected to immigrate to the United States and settled in Syracuse, NY.

Since then, through his John Dau Sudan Foundation, Dau has raised $700,000 and returned to open a clinic in Southern Sudan, which has provided care for more than 25,000 patients, most of whom had never seen a doctor before.

A lecture and discussion with Burlington lawyer Robert Rachlin.  Part of the celebration of the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  The UDHR is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10,1948 in Paris, France.

#14, With American Indian Movement Leader Vernon Bellecourt. Sanders