Kerry Kennedy

Kerry Kennedy is the President and Founder of the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights, www.rfkcenter.org. Ms. Kennedy started working in the field of human rights in 1981 when she investigated abuses committed by U.S. immigration officials against refugees from El Salvador. Since then, her life has been devoted to the vindication of equal justice, to the promotion and protection of basic rights, and to the preservation of the rule of law. She established the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights in 1988 and she has worked on diverse human rights issues such as children’s rights, child labor, disappearances, indigenous land rights, judicial independence, freedom of expression, ethnic violence, impunity, and the environment. She has concentrated specifically on women’s rights, exposing injustices and educating audiences about women’s issues, particularly honor killings, sexual slavery, domestic violence, workplace discrimination, sexual assault, abuse of prisoners, and more. She mother of three daughters, Cara, Mariah and Michaela.

She is the best-selling author of Being Catholic Now, Prominent Americans talk about Change in the Church and the Quest for Meaning and Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World, which features interviews with human rights activists including Marian Wright Edelman, His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and more. Speak Truth, a global education initiative to aid the fight for international human rights, grew from her book exploring the quality of courage through the words of leading human rights defenders around the world to the moving and inspiring play by esteemed Chilean poet and Broadway playwright Ariel Dorfman, the stirring photographic exhibition by Pulitzer Prize-winner Eddie Adams, a PBS documentary film, an education packet, five public service announcements on national television, an award-winning website, www.speaktruthtopower.org and federal legislation which increased federal funding for the protection of human rights. The book has been translated into Arabic, Greek, Spanish and Italian.