Lecture meeting on 11th June 2018

Human Rights. Racism and the death penalty in America.

Talk by: Dr. Brenda Davies

Despite comprehensive international legislation around the preservation of human rights, abuse of such rights continues on a daily basis. In the Southern States of America in the 1990s, in the wake of the Ku Klux Klan, Afro-Americans continued to live in constant fear of persecution, while Afro-American women had the highest rate of infant and maternal mortality in the so-called developed world. Twenty years later, the United States remains the only country in the western world that continues to use the death penalty, more than a third of the national total of executions taking place in Texas.

Speaker biography

The heart of her work, not only in USA but also in Russia, Israel, Cambodia, Cyprus, Ireland, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa and elsewhere always focuses on improving communication, understanding, cooperation, acceptance and the celebration of our differences at grassroots level, promoting empowerment and changing attitudes so as to create unity rather than division. Peace is not the province of politicians but the potential of every human heart. Only in healing our own hearts can we heal the divisions that make racism a possibility and the taking of a human life acceptable.

Dr Davies has lived in Zambia where she had a farm that was the home of many orphans; and in South Carolina and Texas where she worked on human rights and abolishing racism and the death penalty. She’s been a pharmacist, a doctor, a consultant psychiatrist (just retiring at 75). She teaches psychotherapy and the role of spirituality in maintaining our health and longevity and has an international school in eight countries on five continents with hundreds of students.

She’s worked actively for peace in Cyprus, Ireland, Germany, Cambodia and elsewhere. She is the author of seven books on health and spirituality and has just completed her first novel and is writing a screenplay. She is a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother and loves her life and all that’s in it, including dancing in which she indulges daily.

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