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Rick Halperin is Director of the Southern
Methodist University Human Rights Education
Program (http://www.smu.edu/humanrights/),
and teaches courses at SMU including: America's
Dilemma: The Struggle for Human Rights; America
and the Age of Genocide; and America
Enraged: From Brown to Watergate, 1954-1974.
He is frequently interviewed on television and
radio as well as by print media, and he speaks
nationally and internationally on a wide range
of human rights issues including genocide and
the death penalty
Halperin has served on the Board of Directors of
Amnesty International USA from 1989-1995, and
again from 2004-2010; he served as Chair of the
Board from 1992-1993 and again from 2005-2007.
He is also a member of the National Death
Penalty Advisory Committee, the National
Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and the
Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
(serving as President from 2000-2006 and from
2007 to present).
Halperin has been involved in many human rights
monitoring projects, including an Amnesty
International delegation which investigated the
conditions of the Terrell Unit (Texas death row
facility) in Livingston, Texas. In 1998, he was
eyewitness to a lethal injection execution in
the death chamber in Huntsville, Texas.
Halperin also participated in a U.N. Human
Rights delegation and inspected prison
conditions in Dublin, Ireland, and Belfast,
Northern Ireland for a report by the Irish
Prison Commission, and he participated in a
human rights monitoring delegation in El
Salvador in 1987.
In addition to his work against the death
penalty, Halperin is also active in other areas
of human rights. He works with a variety of
organizations which seek improvements in human
rights on behalf of women, children, gays and
lesbians, indigenous persons, survivors of
torture, imprisoned political prisoners of
conscience and human rights defenders,
journalists, and healthcare professionals who
are under non-stop assault by governments around
the world.
Halperin leads groups of interested persons,
including students, faculty, and community
members, on human rights educational journeys
three times each year to places such as
Argentina, Cambodia, Rwanda, South Africa, El
Salvador, Bosnia, and numerous Holocaust sites
across Europe. Every December he takes a group
to death camps and other Holocaust sites in
Poland for two weeks. These trips are designed
to pay tribute, in part, to those men, women and
children who were destroyed in the camps, as
well as to honor those who survived the
experience. (http://smu.edu/newsinfo/stories/rick-halperin-trip-dec2006.asp)
It was, and remains, necessary to remember that
the human spirit is capable of enduring and
vanquishing the most unimaginable horrors that
humanity can produce. |
