Amy Trandem '00 Wins Patrick Stewart Human Rights Scholarship

Amy Trandem '00 (second from right) with Patrick Stewart and scholarship recipients at the New York City awards event, February 26

COURTESY OF AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL

Amy Trandem '00 with coffee plantation children in Guatemala

When a friend asked Amy Trandem '00, then a high school student, to attend an Amnesty International meeting, she went along since she had nothing planned that day. Little did she realize then, that human rights activism would become her passion, or that she would one day spend time in Ecuador compiling a database on torture and detention centers. Like many small steps, attending that first meeting set a direction for Trandem--with a moral compass to guide her. Now majoring in international relations with a human rights concentration, she cochairs MHC's chapter of Amnesty International, was awarded Amnesty's Patrick Stewart Human Rights Scholarship in 1999, and plans to make human rights activism her life's work.

That first Amnesty meeting led to many more, as well as to 1997 stints as a labor union organizer with the AFL-CIO and as a refugee and asylum intern at a Minnesota human rights organization. Trandem spent last year focusing on human rights work abroad. She studied sustainable development and social change during the fall of 1998 through Augsburg College's Center for Global Education Program in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, and focused on international relations during spring 1999 at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador--becoming fluent in Spanish in the process.

While in Ecuador, Trandem applied for Amnesty's Patrick Stewart Human Rights Scholarship, which offers high school, college, and graduate students the opportunity to gain practical experience in the field of human rights during the summer. Since 1996, approximately $70,000 has been awarded to more than fifty young activists who have displayed a strong commitment to human rights work. Most scholarship winners arrange internships with local or global human rights organizations; some propose independent projects to promote human rights awareness. The scholarship is supported by actor Patrick Stewart.

Trandem prepared a proposal with a Latin American human rights group to study refugee policy and its impact on Colombian asylum seekers and was awarded one of sixteen Stewart scholarships given last year. Unfortunately, the director of the organization was arrested on corruption charges, and Trandem was forced to switch gears. She decided to work as a labor investigator intern for the Regional Foundation for Counseling on Human Rights in Quito, Ecuador. Unable to get confirmation from Amnesty about whether it would fund her new project, she proceeded anyway, and the organization later awarded her the $1,400 scholarship.

The award helped cover Trandem's expenses while implementing a project focusing on Ecuadorian labor laws and conditions, which she undertook in the summer of 1999. Her research entailed searching for written resources related to labor rights in libraries and through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). She also interviewed labor lawyers and employees of the Ministry of Labor. This research was compiled into a report covering topics ranging from the right to association (and the recent murders of prominent union leaders), wages and occupations, discrimination against women, and child labor/slavery. This report will serve as a resource for human rights organizations in Ecuador, particularly for the Regional Foundation for Counseling in Human Rights. Trandem also interned with this NGO to learn about the institutionalized violence and torture within the detention centers and prisons of Ecuador and the legal, medical, and social work that the organization is doing to eliminate atrocities.

"I learned firsthand that financial stability is essential to human rights," says Trandem, who walked more than an hour to work when an economic crisis in Quito shut down public transportation, paralyzed banks, and closed businesses. "One day, there were more than ten thousand indigenous people marching into Quito to protest in the streets." Trandem also saw the human side of the torture and violence statistics with which she had been working, when she visited a detention center. Trandem presented her work to Stewart and the other award recipients in New York February 24 - 26.

After graduation, Trandem, who describes herself as a "human rights activist for life," hopes to do corporate accountability work in the free trade zones of Central America--a long way from high school in Minnesota, but part of the journey that began there.