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Young Adventists Work for Human Rights

Atlantic Union College graduate Ron Osborn recently published an article in the Harvard journal Health and Human Rights. HHR is an open-access print and online publication currently under the editorship of Paul Farmer (who was the subject of Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Mountains Beyond Mountains). It includes both critical scholarly work on human rights as well as pieces by practitioners and activists. Ron’s article, which you can access both as html and as a pdf, is entitled, “Correlates of Violence in Guinea’s Maison Centrale Prison: A Statistical Approach to Documenting Human Rights Abuses.”
This piece grew out of work he did in the summer of 2007 (made possible through a grant from the Unruh Institute at the University of Southern California where Ron is a graduate student) with the grassroots human rights NGO, Les Mêmes Droits Pour Tous (Equal Rights for All). The project he helped work on in Guinea (which was conceived and led by Eric Guttschuss, a graduate of Andrews University and the UCLA School of Law, now at Human Rights Watch) involved surveying more than 700 prisoners to assess rights abuses, including evidences of torture by state officials. Once back in the States, Ron analyzed the results using some basic statistical tools to try to better understand the sources of violence and torture in Guinea’s jails. The thumbnail image included in the online version of the HHR piece was a photograph taken by Ron’s younger sister, Kimberly Osborn-Kim. She is a graduate of Pacific Union College and helped to co-found Les Mêmes Droits Pour Tous. Kimberly provided photographic evidence of rights abuses of prisoners for a 2006 report, “The Perverse Side of Things,” by Human Rights Watch.

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