BOSTON — The Armenian Heritage Foundation’s K. George and Carolann S. Najarian, MD inaugural lecture on human rights will be held on Thursday, September 23, at 7 p.m., at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall.
Free and open to the public, the endowed lecture is a public program of the Armenian Heritage Foundation, sponsor of Armenian Heritage Park on Boston’s Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway.
Kerry Kennedy, the keynote speaker, is a human rights activist and founder of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, Washington, DC. She is the author of Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who are Changing Our World.
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.
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 has led more than 40 human rights delegations across the globe. Her life and lectures are testaments to the commitment to the basic values of human rights. She is the best-selling author of Being Catholic Now, Prominent Americans talk about Change in the Church and the Quest for Meaning. She is the mother of three daughters, Cara, Mariah and Michaela.
Opening remarks will be offered by Peter Balakian, Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities, Colgate University, poet and author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response-A History of International Human Rights and Forgotten Heroes, which was the inspiration for this series. He spoke of the New England women and men — intellectuals, politicians, diplomats, religious leaders and ordinary citizens — who, beginning in the 1890s at Faneuil Hall, heard the eyewitness accounts of the atrocities taking place against the Armenian minority of the
