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Member Spotlight By Uyen Campbell. Uyen Campbell is an associate at Hauer, Fargione & Love and a co-chair of the MWL Publications Committee. Social service and social justice began at an early age for Barbara Frey, the 2001 Myra Bradwell Award recipient. Frey grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin as the youngest of five children. “My parents instilled in us a strong belief in education and service,” she said. Frey was also inspired by the Catholic clergy from her high school and college who were involved in social justice activities. With an initial interest in urban affairs issues in the United States, she attended the University of Notre Dame, graduating magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in American Studies. She served as a community organizer during and after college, dealing with poverty and race discrimination issues in Oakland, California and Portland, Oregon. It was in law school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that she became more interested in international human rights work. Frey gained her first real meaningful international work after law school as a volunteer for the Vicariate of Solidarity, a Catholic church human rights agency in Santiago, Chile. She deferred her start at Dorsey & Whitney and spent six months working for the Vicariate of Solidarity. There, she observed lawyers representing victims of torture and those whose families had disappeared. She came through the Chilean experience inspired to pursue international human rights work. When Frey came back to the United States, several lawyers in the community were forming the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, then known as the Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights Committee. Frey quickly became involved in the group as a volunteer. Soon, the Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights Committee had a couple hundred members and Frey was the only employee. When she became Executive Director, only three years later, the group had 15 employees and several thousand members. “It wasn’t the number of people in the group that was amazing,” said Frey, “It was the work that we had done, including 30 human rights reports on 20 different countries and several successful projects on topics such as the death penalty, violations in Mexico and women’s human rights.” Frey is proudest of her involvement in facilitating all the wonderful human rights work that has come out of Minnesota. “We now have a network of literally dozens of human rights experts, mostly lawyers, who are working in countries around the world in key spots and all of them trained in their early years in the profession of Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights. I’ve had a chance to be a mentor to a lot of talented students and professionals who are making a real difference in the world,” said Frey. Frey continues her work mentoring students as an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota in the Law School and the Institute for Global Studies. In addition to her work at the University of Minnesota, Frey works as an International Human Rights Law Consultant. She also currently serves as a chair for the St.Paul-Minneapolis Committee on Foreign Relations, as advisory chair for the Center for Social Concerns at the University Of Notre Dame and as vice chair on the Advisory Committee for the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. Frey hopes to play a more active and key role in bringing together the academic and activist dimensions of the human rights issue. “Bringing researchers from universities together with human rights activists will make human rights protection more effective,” said Frey, “and likewise we need to have the human rights community step up and begin to lay out the research agenda for the next couple of decades in human rights.”
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