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CHAPEL HILL -- An American lawyer who has championed human rights and racial justice at home and abroad, working for the United Nations and other major organizations, will speak Tuesday (March 16) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Gay McDougall, whose laurels include helping to arrange all-races elections in South Africa after apartheid, will deliver the annual Sonja Haynes Stone Memorial Lecture at 7 p.m. in the Tate Turner Kuralt Building on Pittsboro Street. "Race and Poverty: Critical Frontiers for Human Rights Advocacy" will be her topic.

UNC's Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History presents this free public lecture annually in honor of its namesake. The late Carolina professor of African and Afro-American studies advocated both the center and positive race relations. Speakers, all black women chosen because they exemplify Stone’s ideals, have included Angela Davis, Sonia Sanchez and Alfre Woodard.

Based in Washington, D.C., McDougall is executive director of Global Rights, a human rights advocacy group with offices in 10 countries. The group works with activists around the world to challenge oppression. She has worked with the United Nations in several capacities.

Dr. Joseph Jordan. Stone Center director, called McDougall "someone who best exemplifies how our activism and interests can be realized in our vocations. She has successfully combined her commitment to human rights and social justice with her professional life as a lawyer and activist.

"She’s extremely knowledgeable as well as a visionary when it comes to world affairs," he said, noting McDougall’s receipt in 1999 of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for her work for international human rights. Among her achievements:

• In the 1980s, McDougall directed the Southern Africa Project of the Washington-based Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The project was founded to combat the1967 terrorism act in South Africa that allowed police to detain political activists indefinitely without trial or legal representation. The project raised funds and recruited pro bono attorneys to defend political prisoners. "I would say we have been responsible for getting literally thousands of people out of jail," McDougall has said. "We helped mount cases that challenged a lot of apartheid laws and caused many of them to be overturned."
  
• She also helped parties negotiating with the South African government in 1994 for a transition to a post-apartheid democratic government, providing analyses of similar constitutional arrangements in other nations. McDougall was one of five non-South Africans, and the only American, appointed to a 16-member Independent Electoral Commission, set up by the country’s leaders to help create a new, more democratic nation.
  
• In 1989, McDougall founded a bipartisan group of 31 Americans who monitored the transition to independence for Namibia that had been mandated by the United Nations.
  
• In 1996, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights elected McDougall to a four-year term as an alternate member of its Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. In that post, McDougall investigated instances of rape, sexual slavery and slavery-like practices in armed conflict. Her study, presented to the U.N. Sub-Commission on Human Rights, called for international legal standards for prosecuting such acts. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia later cited her report as "an authoritative statement of international criminal law" in a landmark sexual violence case involving detention, torture and killing of civilians in a prison camp.
  
• In 1998, McDougall was elected as an independent expert for a United Nations group that oversees the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the first American elected to the 18-member body. The group oversees compliance with U.N. human rights treaties.

A 1994 Washington Post profile of McDougall traced her upbringing in Atlanta, where she had a ringside seat to the civil rights movement and the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Julian Bond and others.

In 1965, she was chosen to integrate Agnes Scott College in nearby Decatur. "It was not a good experience," she said, and after two years she transferred to Bennington College in Vermont, "as much of an opposite as you could get." There, her work in voter registration drives and other civil rights efforts fostered her interest in law. She completed law school at Yale University, then honed her skills and saved her pennies while working for a corporate law firm in New York City for two years.

McDougall then worked for free for two years as general counsel for the National Conference of Black Lawyers. She became the group’s representative to the United Nations and there developed an international task force on liberation movements in Africa. McDougall and others were beginning to transfer ideals and techniques of the American civil rights movement to aid those African struggles.

Again in need of cash, McDougall went to work for the New York City Board of Corrections, charged with eradicating conditions cited by inmates in the 1971 Attica prison riot. Then, hungry to revisit international issues, she headed in 1977 for the London School of Economics, where she earned a master’s degree in public international law.

"The school had a history of training politically active people in social justice issues, and London was then the epicenter of southern African liberation movements in exile," the Post reported. Both nurtured McDougall’s ideal of a reordered world in which every person could live a decent life -- even as she observed superpower cynicism that international humanitarian laws cannot be enforced.

"So much of that attitude is U.S.-based," she told the Post. "We think if you can’t take out a big stick and beat somebody over the head, then you’ve got no rules. In fact, that’s sort of where U.S. foreign policy has always been blindsided. My view of international law has a moral component. There are lots of other forces in the world that can produce change other than big sticks." Ever since, she has worked to enhance those forces.

In a tangential connection to UNC, McDougall’s husband, John Payton, was lead attorney for the University of Michigan in the affirmative action case decided by the Supreme Court last summer. The UNC School of Law filed a brief with the court supporting Michigan’s position.

Besides McDougall’s speech, the program Tuesday at UNC will feature a presentation on the life and legacy of Dr. Stone; an introduction of McDougall by UNC law professor Adrienne Davis; and an a cappella arrangement of the national Negro anthem "Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing" performed by Harmonyx, a vocal ensemble of the Black Student Movement.

Parking is free after 5 p.m. in most campus lots including the lot at McCauley and Pittsboro streets. For more information, call the Stone Center at 962-9001.

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Photo URL:  http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/event/lecture/mcdougall_gay.jpg

For more information about the center, visit ; for more on the International Human Rights Law Group, click to http://www.hrlawgroup.org/about_ihrlg/default.asp

Stone Center contacts: Dr. Joseph Jordan, Jennifer Ramirez, 926-9001; jfjordan@email.unc.edu, jramirez@email.unc.edu

News Services Contact: L.J. Toler, 962-8589, laura_toler@unc.edu