As an award-winning human rights defender, Karen Tse has worked across the globe to ensure those rights exist. 

Tse will present the third University Lecture of the spring semester Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. in Hendricks Chapel. She is the founder of International Bridges to Justice, a nonprofit that works to ensure fair trials and due process in developing countries. 

Tse’s lecture, ‘Transformation and Liberation: Rising Up From Fear to Hope,’ is co-sponsored by the honors program in cooperation with the College of Law and the School of Education. 

Esther Gray, senior administrator for academic affairs, said Tse’s presentation will have a positive effect on the University Lectures series because of her work for human rights.

‘Ms. Tse is a humanitarian of the highest order,’ Gray said. ‘She is one individual who saw a huge need and worked to alleviate the abuse and criminal treatment of people.’

As a former public defender, Tse became interested in the intersection of criminal law and human rights after seeing Southeast Asian refugees put in prison without trial, according to the IBJ website. She said she remembers talking through the bars of a cell in Cambodia to a young boy who had been detained and tortured by the police.

‘Like most prisoners in Cambodia, he had no lawyer or human rights worker to defend him or safeguard his rights, and he had no pending trial date to determine his guilt or innocence,’ she said on the IBJ website.

Tse moved to Cambodia in 1994 to train groups of public defenders, including judges and prosecutors, and later worked as a U.N. judicial mentor, according to Tse’s biography on the University Lecture website. She then established the first arraignment court in Cambodia. 

In 2000, Tse founded IBJ to ‘promote systemic global change in the administration of criminal justice,’ according to the website. 

Under Tse, IBJ has extended its reach to many countries, including Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Burundi, according to the website. Last year, IBJ created the Justice Training Center in Singapore. Tse is currently working on a Global Defender Support program to extend the reach of IBJ’s aid to public defenders worldwide, according to the website.

A graduate of the University of California in Los Angeles School of Law and Harvard Divinity School, Tse was recognized for her work in human rights with the 2008 American Bar Association’s International Human Rights Award, according to the IBJ website. U.S. News and World Report also named Tse in its America’s Best Leaders list in 2007. 

Tse represents a positive image SU students and communities should care about, said Gray, the senior administrator for academic affairs. When Ishmael Beah, author of ‘A Long Way Gone,’ visited SU a couple of years ago, he said a piece of everyone is lost when anyone is harmed or killed because of violence or the loss of human rights, Gray said.

‘Ms. Tse must believe the same thing,’ she said. ‘Our students and community should care because of what she stands for and the good she has accomplished, especially since she has done it through nonviolent and legal measures and education.’

hasimon@syr.edu

Published on March 21, 2011 at 12:00 pm