Undergraduate degree program officially begins in spring 2012
September 15, 2011
DALLAS (SMU) — SMU is the first university in the South, and only the fifth in the country, to offer an academic major in human rights. Approved Sept. 9 by SMU’s Board of Trustees, the Bachelor of Arts in human rights degree comes five years after creation of the Embrey Human Rights Program at SMU.
The undergraduate degree program officially begins in spring 2012 but most SMU students will be allowed to apply past or current courses toward the degree, says Embrey Human Rights Program Director Rick Halperin. The human rights major will offer two interdisciplinary tracks: one on gender and human rights, the other on public policy and human rights.
In December 2008, a group of nine from SMU toured World War II death camps in Poland, including Auschwitz, Treblinka and the Warsaw Ghetto. Rick Halperin, director of the SMU Human Rights Education Program, has led SMU trips to Poland every year since 1996.
A video of the trip is available online (right). Videographer was Sherry Aikman and post production was done by Nathan Gibbs.
Read a student blog about this trip. A student blog about a previous trip also is available online (See the section for Dec. 23 - Jan. 15).
Across America today, on Independence Day, there will be traditional fireworks, parades, summer fun for children in swimming pools and at ballgames, and a pervasive national outpouring of patriotism, reflected in both flag displays and the singing of the national anthem at countless events.
There are also almost 3,300 individuals who will not be any part of these festivities; they are mostly forgotten, despised and reviled.... they are America's condemned.
They sit on death rows in 34 states, as well as in a military prison in Kansas and a federal facility in Indiana. Most are overwhelmingly guilty of vile, heinous, outrageous and terrible crimes. Many are mentally ill, even profoundly mentally ill, and a good number are innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted. Collectively, they are, in part, responsible for a great deal of anger, hurt, pain and rage in our society.
They face death by firing squad, hanging, electrocution, cyanide gas, and lethal injection (there are more methods of legitimate state-sanctioned execution in the USA than in any other country in the world).
As this nation is trying to emerge from the worst global financial crisis in 70 years, it remains in desperate need of trying to find, uphold and defend its moral soul. We are a long way from accomplishing this important national task.
Most of America's political and judicial leaders, both male and female, in both major parties, remain committed to upholding the ideology and practice of human extermination. As long as any nation in the world, including the USA, retain and practice the barbarism of killing people in the name of the law, they can never be free. If people support, or are indifferent to the liquidation of condemned individuals, how can we be surprised that other horrors, such as torture, hate crimes, and crimes against women, continue at such an alarming pace.
To be sure, some advances in the abolition of the US death penalty have been achieved in the last decade: America has stopped executing its juvenile and mentally retarded offenders; New Jersey and New Mexico have legislatively ended the death penalty, and other states have, in recent years, come close to doing the same. Over 130 innocent people have been released from America's death rows to date, and more will emerge to the free world in the years ahead.
But this "progress" has come at a frustratingly, agonizingly slow pace. Of the 1168 individuals put to death in America since executions resumed in 1977, 736 have occurred since 1998, including 200 just in Texas alone since Rick Perry became governor in 2001. There is no immediate end in sight to this horror.
There will undoubtedly be the traditional praise and self-congratulatory editorials and op-eds in our newspapers today, from coast to coast, from our major cities to our small communities, reminding us of how lucky we are to live in such a great nation. And in many ways, that sentiment is correct.
But it is a fallacy to believe that assessment when considering what is happening in this country regarding the issue of the death penalty. It is time to face the truth, admit national pain, and come to grips with the fact that on this issue, 233 years after the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed (and 402 years after the British first settled here), we are a national disgrace and failure. We remain wedded to the love of violence, and to the preposterous idea that some people in our society (and even around the world), can be classified as "lesser" or "other" humans, 'deserving' to be stripped of their human dignity, caged like animals for years, physically and psychologically tortured and terrorized, and then ultimately liquidated in the name of the law.
On this day, when so much celebrating in America will occur, I hope and trust that people will take a hard look at the sobering realities of this nation and its nightmare of the death penalty. Now is the time for all people of conscience, everywhere, to re-dedicate themselves with renewed fervor to end this terrible scourge, so that America may join the ranks of most nations in the world that have long since recognized the links between advancing human progress with ending the death penalty.
When the US does abolish the death penalty, it will then, and only then, have reasons to be proud and celebrate itself.
Rick Halperin Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and Amnesty International USA (Dallas, Texas)
thank you sooooooo much, my Friend, for allowing me to post here !!!
i am an ethnologist and human rights activist, in the last years more than anything else against USA Death Penalty and for American Indians prisoners’ rights.
i write, i love to draw and take-create pictures but i’m not an artist .... i hope for a better world and i believe in Freedom, the one we make with our hands !!!
