William Felice
in Léo Matarasso, Seminario del 6 dicembre 2008, Cedetim, Parigi
As always, it is great to hear from you. Yes, the election of Obama is just wonderful. It is a significant step that America can elect an African-American to the Presidency! Obama also has a deep intelligence which will serve him (and the country) well. And, finally, Bush has been repudiated!
My early experience with the League was to serve as the League’s representative to the UN in New York City. The League had consultative status to the UN, so we were able to submit statements and facilitate testimony on our areas of concern, including East Timor, Western Sahara and Nicaragua. We also, for a brief period, organized an US chapter of the League.
My participation in Athens and Paris was to report on the UN work and make sure that the work in NY was in alignment with the League’s priorities.
I should also mention the “Summit of the Seven Poorest People’s” sponsored by the International League, TOES, and CEDETIM held in 1990 in Houston, Texas. Our “witnesses” were from Nigeria, Guatemala, Native Americans, Columbia, Haiti, Bangladesh, Philippines, and Puerto Rico.
Ed McCaughan and I gathered many of the contributions made at the Third Congress of the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples’ held in Paris in 1987 on human rights and peoples’ rights and put together a special issue of the journal “Social Justice” on these themes. This edited volume of Social Justice (Vol. 16, No. 1) titled “Human Rights and Peoples’ Rights: Views from North & South” was published in the Spring of 1989.
I have continued to work on issues of peoples’ rights/group rights/collective human rights. My books “Taking Suffering Seriously: The Importance of Collective Human Rights” and “The Global New Deal: Economic and Social Human Rights in World Politics” are focused on the dialectic between the rights of groups and individual human rights protection. My attention, in particular, has been on issues of economic and social rights fulfilment.
All the best,
Bill
Felice, William
in: <strong>Léo Matarasso,
Seminario del 6 dicembre 2008, Cedetim, Parigi
Milano, maggio 2009</strong>