Saturday, March 11, 2000
Human rights advocates share stories
UC grads' work spans globe
BY BEN L. KAUFMAN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Praised for their impact, graduates returned to the University of Cincinnati's Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights on Friday for show-and-tell.
Monique Hoeflinger brought her prestigious Soros Fellowship to work on issues troubling women in Ohio prisons.
Sue Tatten shared drawings of Ethiopians among whom she worked.
Michael Heflin described Amnesty International's campaign to include sexual orientation and same-sex relations among recognized human rights.
David Stoelting, class of '90, described his efforts during the drafting of the treaty to create an International Criminal Court.
And Ann Catherine Blank, Dina Haynes and Jill Rhodes recounted ways human rights efforts overseas can be rewarding, despite mind-boggling bureaucracies.
“Looking at the little things keeps you positive,” Ms. Rhodes warned; and if students feel drawn to careers in human rights rather than private law firms, “follow your heart. Do what you really feel you want to be doing ... The money does come.”
They and their mentors in the College of Law, where the institute is based, still were glowing with praise from Mary Robinson, U.N. high commissioner for human rights and former president of Ireland.
At Thursday's 20th anniversary dinner, she called the Urban Morgan Institute “a great achievement” and its publications, director, students and graduates a “rich resource of human rights.”
In Friday's law school forum, 1990 graduate Mr. Heflin said hostility to individuals because of their sexual orientation remains the “most accepted and tolerated form of discrimination.”
Based in New York, he directs Amnesty International's Out Front Program, cautioning that even where governments do not punish sexual orientation or same-sex relations, others frequently violate the rights of lesbians, gay, bisexuals and transgender individuals with “impunity.”
Miss Hoeflinger, completing a graduate degree in women's studies at Ohio State University, will use her two-year Soros grant to develop programs to teach female inmates in Ohio about their rights and to advocate those rights.
A 1999 graduate, she said women inmates have unique and unattended problems of health care, child custody and sexual/physical abuse in institutions designed for and by men and largely staffed by men.
Ms. Hoeflinger is working with Cincinnati lawyer Alphonse A. Gerhardstein, Ohio's leading advocate for inmates.
“Why did we pick women? Because people still have a little bit of heart left for women,” Mr. Gerhardstein said during their presentation Friday.
Ms. Blank, a 1986 graduate working in Vienna as a political adviser to the U.S. delegation to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, is helping oversee municipal elections in Bosnia after helping implement the treaty negotiated in Dayton, Ohio. She also has been active in forming the mission “that just took the field” in Kosovo.
Friday, Ms. Blank touched a common theme, that people's needs for safety, shelter and food must be addressed before they can be led toward democracy and the rule of law. Even so, “there's a lot of good you can do.”
Mr. Stoelting, of New York, described the difficulties countries are having accommodating proposed procedures for the International Criminal Court “but there were no countries ... that were coming out against the idea.” That includes the United States, which was in the tiny minority that voted against the treaty creating the court in 1998.
Now, he's part of the American Bar Association team drafting rules fo procedure and evidence for the court.
Ms. Haynes, class of '95, is liaison officer for coordinating humanitarian efforts in Knin, Croatia, for the UN high commission for refugees.
Whereas human rights typically involve individuals with their governments, she said, “refugees are people who do not have a state. ... Refugees don't fit neatly into human rights law.”
Her first task is to protect refugees — forced from their countries — and displaced persons — who have left their homes but not their countries.
Ms. Haynes said “lawlessness” must be put down before pursuing the rule of law that undergirds any search for democracy.
Ms. Rhodes, a 1993 graduate, is deputy director of the Office for Development of Democracy and Rule of Law in Russia for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“Democracy is no longer a luxury for wealthy nations,” she said, because “economic growth is linked to democracy.”
Moscow-based Ms. Rhodes said a country can have growth and an authoritarian government, but the economy would be even stronger if it were more democratic.
“Trying to make small differences can be very satisfying,” she said, recalling work in Bolivia and USAID's success in helping start Russia's first politically and financially independent student paper.
“It has to be demand driven,” Ms. Rhodes said. “If they don't want it, it's not going to go anywhere.”
Similarly, Ms. Tatten cautioned, she learned that “I can't impose my Western values on African people.” Instead, she supported issues raised by women among whom she lived.
And Ms. Tatten said years in Botswana and Ethiopia taught her that “we can't talk to people about their civil rights if they don't have any food.”
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