Schulz-Amnesty Lecture
SALISBURY, MD---Dr. William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International (USA) and author of In Our Own Best Interest: How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All, lectures on Wednesday, March 13, at 4 and 7:30 p.m. in the Wicomico Room of the Guerrieri University Center at Salisbury University. Admission is free and the public is cordially invited.
An ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, Schulz came to Amnesty after involvement in a wide variety of international and social justice causes as president of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA) from 1985-93.
As UUA president, he led the first visit by a U.S. member of Congress to post-revolutionary Romania in January 1991. This delegation was instrumental in the improvement of the rights of religious and ethnic minorities there.
Schulz spent February 1992 in India consulting with the Holdeen India Fund, dedicated to the political and economic empowerment of women, bonded laborers and others and to ending communal violence. He led fact-finding missions to the Middle East and Northern Ireland in his denomination's opposition to U.S. military aid to El Salvador.
In 1997 he led an Amnesty mission to Liberia, investigating atrocities committed during its civil war, and returned to Northern Ireland in 1999 to insist on the incorporation of human rights protections into the peace process. He is outspoken in his opposition to the death penalty and his support for women's rights, gay and lesbian rights, and racial justice.
Through compelling arguments and vivid, even humorous, stories, In Our Own Best Interest: How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All (Beacon Press 2001), Schulz responds to so-called "foreign policy realists" who debunk the importance of human rights by demonstrating how defending human rights abroad is essential to protecting our own national security, environment, international investments and public health.
"Whether it be war and peace, international trade, economic growth, the security of jobs, the state of our environment, the public health, the interdiction of drugs, or a host of other topics, there is a connection between Americans' own interests and international human rights," said Schulz.
Books are on sale at a reception, also in the Wicomico Room, sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship at Salisbury, following the 7:30 p.m. lecture. Amnesty International, the English, History, Communication and Theatre Arts departments and the Dean's Office of the Fulton School of Liberal Arts, the Student Government Association and the Student Affairs Office sponsor the event. For information call 410-543-6030 or visit the SU Web site at www.salisbury.edu.