Amnesty International Chief Headlines Carr Fellow Class

The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy announced its six new fellows on Friday, including a Pulitzer Prize winner, a documentary filmmaker, and an NBC news military analyst.

As fellows, each will be participating in the Carr Center’s programs, as well as conducting research on human rights policy for the 2006-2007 school year.

Ilana Fischer, a spokeswoman for the Carr Center fellows program, said that the center was looking for “a group of people that represent a diverse range of human rights issues” who would bring a real “lived experience” to these issues.

William F. Schulz, one of the new fellows and the former executive director of Amnesty International, has been “a major player in the human rights world,” Fischer said. As the director of Amnesty for the past 12 years and president of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations prior to that, Schulz has worked extensively in the human rights arena.

“We are thrilled to have him here with us this year at the Carr Center to deepen our bench of human rights practitioners,” Fisher said.

Schulz will focus his research at the center on the role of human rights in US foreign policy. His recent book, “Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights,” examines the human rights advocacy world after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the challenges that liberals face in campaigning for human rights while maintaining national security. Schulz’s goal will be to articulate a new approach to human rights in the context of U.S. foreign policy, he said.

“The Bush years have been very challenging and confusing for the human rights community because Bush has advanced his agenda under the guise and in the language of defending human rights,” Schulz said. “The war in Iraq is descended in the name of humanitarian intervention to protect the world from Saddam and protect the Iraqi people, yet at the same time the world, even the U.S., ignores the true need for humanitarian intervention in Darfur.”

The other five fellows are Caroline Elkins, Foster associate professor of African Studies and winner of the 2006 Pulitzer for non-fiction; Omer Ismail, a Sudanese activist studying the genocide in Darfur; Andrea Rossi, the former research coordinator of United Nations Children’s Fund’s Innocenti Research Centre; Beena Sarwar, a journalist and documentary filmmaker studying human rights in Pakistan; and William Arkin, NBC News military analyst who will be writing a chapter for the upcoming book “In Search of the Perfect War.”

Undergraduates will have the opportunity to apply to be Carr Center student liaisons, who work closely with the fellows, assisting them in their research and helping to integrate them into the Harvard community at large.