News stories by Kerry Kennedy

WASHINGTON, Jul 09 (IPS) - Visiting Bangladesh has been a lifelong dream of mine, but all that I had heard about a people who love freedom so much that they have withstood great armies, famine and intractable poverty could not prepare me for what I've seen in the last three days.  

'Are you crazy, Fauziya?' Cecilia asked. 'You want to go back to Togo?' Cecilia Jeffrey, herself hailing from the West African country, couldn't believe her ears. Her friend and roommate Fauziya Kassinja was confessing she was ready to end her struggle to be the first woman in U.S. history to gain political asylum because she feared female genital mutilation. Later Cecilia walked out of the shower and showed Fauziya how she had been changed forever in an effort to convince her friend to change her mind, writes Kerry Kennedy, President of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.

Recently, I joined some of our nation's heroes walking the trail of the civil rights movement in Alabama. No one has done more to stop hate groups in the United States over the past three decades than Morris Dees through the Southern Poverty Law Center. Morris pioneered the strategy of holding hate groups accountable through civil suits awarding damages so expensive that the defendants are forced into bankruptcy and closed. Over thirty people have gone to prison for plots to assassinate him, writes Kerry Kennedy, President, Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Center for Justice and Human Rights and Honorary Chair, RFK Foundation of Europe, Onlus.

For 30 years, Senator Edward Kennedy was the human rights movement's strongest ally and its soul on Capitol Hill, writes Kerry Kennedy, President of the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation of Europe.