Jack Healey

Prisons always tell stories, whether their governments like it or not. Dr. King and Nelson Mandela had a lot to say that move millions of people to grasp the reality of their struggle. Even guilty stories of bad treatment can close a jail like Alcatraz and the infamous prison in...

How can we best support a transition towards full reform in Burma? How might we best support human rights there? Isn't the first step a full freedom from fear that necessitates an elimination of the eminent threat of violence? The answers may not be simple, but there are certain steps...

In the world of human rights, there is always a tension between those in power and the common folk. There needn't be. In Chinese, the term Lao Mingzi means Old Hundred Names. It is an idiom that denotes the mass of society, encompassing the traditional surnames of Chinese culture. Typically,...

Though it takes more patience, recent history has shown that people power is more effective than state violence.

Sometimes those, like myself, who advocate people power gloss over the positive impact that state violence has had in the world. The fight over slavery was a fight defined...

We human rights people have insisted that Myanmar is not the name of Burma. We see the name of Myanmar as a military name, not one chosen by its people. So, in symbolic protest of Myanmar's history as a military dictatorship which has long raped, tortured and abused its people,...

This is a piece I never thought I'd be writing. A unique moment is about to begin in American history.

The United States is about to add an unknown number of political prisoners to its jails. After a legacy of torture inherited by the Bush/Cheney team, we are about to...

On Dec. 10, the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), I usually write a blog regarding human rights across the globe and how we people of the earth are being treated by our governments. This year, however, I want to focus on a single national issue. This...

In the first phase of the AIDS crisis, a campaign was initiated to have a Day Without Art to highlight the impact of HIV in society by drawing attention to the impact it had in arts communities. Today, over 8,000 museums and galleries take part internationally to alternately shroud or...

As a 50-year veteran of the human rights movement, I was surprised to hear human rights groups' responses to President Obama's recent announcement that the U.S. would send 100 military advisers to central Africa to aid the fight against the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

Extreme pro-interventionist groups, such as the...

As America faces its next election, we find ourselves in the middle of a growing schism: left and right, rich and poor, peace and war. This gap has grown so wide that it feels as though we are living in a disjointed America where even neighbors seem countries apart. Where...

It is not hard to find examples of investigative reporting that changed the world. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and Seymour Hirsh's famous exposé of American soldiers' abuses in Vietnam, helped end slavery, reform the food industry, and end the war in Vietnam. At Amnesty...

I remember fairly little about my 14th year. I remember that I was a freshman in high school, that I found myself in the principle's office with surprising regularity, that my teachers grew increasingly frustrated with my raucous behavior both in an outside the classroom. I remember it was a...

During his confirmation hearings to become the head of the CIA, General David Petraeus spoke to the issue of torture during the Bush/Cheney years with an unexpected metaphor. He said that he hoped he did not have to look in the rear-view mirror regarding these human rights abuses....

Two weeks ago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates approved the use of unmanned drone attacks on Libyans. These weapons are less accurate than the government purports and give the American Empire an eerie Orwellian image around the world. Americans have yet to come to grips with the...

On April 18, 2011, the writer Peter Godwin wrote an article for the New York Times about Côte d'Ivoire and South Africa. Reading it awakened in me memories of the late 1970s when I was a Peace Corps director in Lesotho, a republic completely surrounded by South Africa....

Recently, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, was denied permission to visit Pfc. Bradley Manning who allegedly handed over U.S. government documents to Wiki Leaks. This comes in the face of allegations that Manning is being tortured in Virginia, possibly while you read this article. He is...

The term "Human Rights abuse" tends to invoke images of authoritarian regimes that rob their citizens of their right to free expression and torture. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- which was adopted by the United Nations in 1948 and holds the world record as the most...

As we celebrate both St Patrick's Day and the 50th anniversary of Amnesty International, I think of my visits with Sean MacBride, the organizational founder of Amnesty. Along with Peter Benenson, Sean was the idea man behind the whole idea of Amnesty. I think it is appropriate to dwell on...

In Tunisia on Dec 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, aged 26, a fruit seller in the town of Sidi Bouzid (population around 40,000) found himself in trouble. On a good day, he was making ten dollars and was hoping to send his sister to college. Because his fruit stand was near...

Surprises can be make one think. We are engaged in a war on terror in Iraq when 19 of the 20 9/11 hijackers were Saudis and none were Iraqi. American doctors used black communities in the U.S. as guinea pigs for unethical medical experiments and did the same to Guatemalans...