Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 19:10:37 -0700
From: mrstwood@earthlink.net ("Michelle Wood")
Subject: [aiarizona] Women and Human Rights Lecture/Panel Discussion

LECTURE / PANEL DISCUSSION: Women and Human Rights
Co-sponsored by AI-ASUW and Feminist Majority.

Date: Monday, March 25 from 11 to 1 
Location: ASU West Campus -- La Sala B 
Light lunch will be provided

  a.. Donna Hamm --Middle Ground Prison Reform, Inc 
  Women In Prison: The Step-Children of Corrections

  Donna Leone Hamm is the founder and executive director of MIDDLE GROUND PRISON
REFORM, a non-profit organization dedicated to a more balanced approach
to corrections policy and law. She was a lower court judge for almost ten
years. She also formerly administered an agency for delinquent and dependent
teenage girls and was eecutive director of a professional association 
of criminal defense attorneys. Donna Hamm is an outspoken opponent of capital
punishment and has lectured extensively on a variety of justice issues at
both the state and national level. She was a witness, at the prisoners=92
request, to the state=92s first gas chamber execution in thirty years in April
1992. As a pro se litigant, she filed and won six lawsuits against the
State of Arizona, the Arizona Department of Corrections and/or the Arizona
Board of Pardons and Paroles. In each case, she prevailed and the litigation
affected all prisoners and/or their families. Working as the Director for
Middle Ground since its formation in 1983, Donna Hamm has become an experienced
statewide and national criminal justice activist and is the leading 
prisoner/family advocate in Arizona. She is qualified as an expert in executive
clemency matters before the Arizona courts. Judge Hamm was an appointed
member of the State=92s Sentencing and Parity Review Committee for the 1994
Arizona Criminal Code. 

  b.. Kyrsten Sinema, CISW, from Women in Black will speak: 
  The Women in Black stand in silent vigil to protest war, rape as a tool of
war, ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses all over the world. We are 
silent because mere words cannot express the tragedy that wars and hatred bring.
We refuse to add to the cacophony of empty statements that are spoken
with the best intentions yet may be erased or go unheard under a passing ambulance
or the wound of a bomb exploding nearby. 

  Our silence is visible. We invite women to stand with us, reflect about themselves
and women who have been raped, tortured or killed in concentration
camps, women who have disappeared, whose loved ones have disappeared or have
been killed, whose homes have been demolished. We wear black as a symbol
to mourn for all victims of war, to mourn the destruction of people, nature
and the fabric of life.

  Women in Black has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and is, according
to Ronnie Gilbert writing in The Progressive, under investigation by the
FBI.

  Women in Black stand in silent vigil around the world at various times and
places. In Phoenix vigils are held at the Central Library each Wednesday 
afternoon between 4:30 and 5:30.

  c.. Fernando Tes=F3n - ASU College of Law
  The War on Terrorism, Feminism, and Women's Rights 

  This presentation will center on the liberation of Afghan women by Allied
troops and the reaction of te feminist movement in the US to that event. 
Prior to joining the ASU faculty, Professor Tes=F3n has served as a diplomat
for the Argentina Foreign Ministry in Argentina and at the embassy in Brussels.
He has been a visiting professor at several institutions including Cornell
Law School and the Oxford-George Washington International Human Rights
Program. 


  d.. Nicolle Walker - Amnesty International, ASUW 
  Amnesty International's Work on the Human Rights of Women

  Focusing on Amnesty's work on the Human Rightsof Women, this presentation
will discuss issues surrounding Women Human Rights Defenders, Amnesty's work
with Women in Prison, and Amnesty's perspective on the ratification/importance
of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
against Women (CEDAW).