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Speaking out: American activist passionate about rights, justice

Albert is known for her commitment to Roma minority issues

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 25th, 2007 issue

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST
Gwendolyn Albert received Life Together's 2007 human rights award for testifying at the EU Human Rights Court about the forced sterilization of Romany women.
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DANA WILSON/The Prague Post
Albert often takes to the streets coordinating rallies on social justice issues with her megaphone in hand.
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The Albert file

Age: 40
From: California; first came to Prague in 1988 and moved to the city in 1994
Education: University of California, Berkeley, studied Czech and linguistics
Work: Has been a member of the Czech Government and Human Rights Council since 1996
Has worked in Kosovo and in the Czech Republic

Gwendolyn Albert was one of the few Americans on Wenceslas Square in 1989 when police drew their batons to beat back the beginnings of the Velvet Revolution.
She was only a few feet and a generous dose of luck away from being bloodied by police. But it was what followed that affected her profoundly. Police avoided confronting demonstrators after those first tense moments, leading to a peaceful change in government.
“It was an incredible time. It made everybody realize that dramatic social change is possible,” Albert said. “Once you’ve seen people making the transition to that environment where they are freer and they can start to exercise their rights, then you want to see it just keep going.”
Albert first came to Prague to study linguistics and Czech, listening, perhaps, to a part of her that reached back five generations, when her family left these parts for the United States.
After the revolution, Albert’s interest in language was overtaken by a passion for social justice. She now has permanent residency in the Czech Republic and lives in the Smíchov neighborhood of Prague with her husband, an English teacher who is also from the United States.
Born in 1967, Albert spent her childhood in Oakland, California, and went to college in Berkeley, an epicenter for U.S. peace and civil rights movements. This helped Albert forge what she calls her “strong sense of justice and injustice.”
Since the revolution, Albert hasn’t stopped working for social change. In her view, the society imagined by many in 1989 has not been fully realized.
“I think there was a promise of a kind of society in 1989, and there is a big gap in that promise for some people, and it would be nice to see that gap overcome.”
Specifically, that gap deals largely with Roma, or Gypsy, issues, a movement Albert has devoted herself to and has become known for.
Since 1998, Albert has been a member of the government’s Human Rights Council. For the past year, she has worked as an independent expert for them. And from 2004 to 2006 she worked as the director of the Human Rights League, a Czech nongovernmental organization.
During her time at the league, Albert focused on the issue of forced sterilization of Romany women and on housing evictions.
“[Gwen] is a key member of the civic society here,” says Kumar Viswanathan, director of Life Together, an Ostrava-based human rights group that works with the Roma. “She has been trying to help the Roma in Central Europe for a long time.”
Albert has also worked with Roma in the Balkans and Albania, he said.
This spring, Albert went to the European Union Human Rights Court in Strasbourg, France, to testify about the forced sterilization of Romany women, he said. Similarly, late last year she went to New York City to speak about the issue at the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. Elena Gorolová, a Romany woman who says she was sterilized against her will, also spoke.
For giving international testimony, Life Together gave Albert and Gorolová its human rights award this year.
“She is young, she is dynamic, she is a bold lady, she is not afraid,” Viswanathan said of Albert. “People are still very gingery about expressing opinions in public and Gwen doesn’t feel shy. … She is open about her feelings and positions.”
Those feelings run especially strong regarding when Albert talks about her feelings that the Roma were marginalized even further after the revolution.
“Their suffering is absolutely unrecognized in this society,” Albert said. “The Roma are really hated, and it’s deeply culturally ingrained, hundreds of years old.”
Not only do Roma face discrimination in every aspect of their lives, she said, but they also dealt with a “huge wave of violence” from other Czechs in the 1990s. The situation is so dire that at least one Romany man has been granted political asylum abroad, in Ireland in 1999.
Albert is still active in the Ostrava-based Group of Women Harmed by Sterilization but now works for Peacework Development, a U.S. group that creates opportunities for women in Cameroon, India, Kenya and Nepal.
Albert was asked by the Human Rights League board to leave in December. She said the board had “flimsy reasons” for her dismissal, adding that the news came as a shock.
Jiří Kopal, chairman of the league, called the issue an “internal organizational matter” but said Albert’s work with the Roma has been important.
“We think it’s very useful if she can continue with other people and not with lawyers,” Kopal said. The league is composed largely of lawyers.
Vishwanathan called the dismissal unfair. He said Life Together wanted to show appreciation of her work by giving her its human rights award.
Undeterred by the controversy, Albert said she will continue her work on human-rights issues and on helping to push the country toward the ideals she saw come to life on Prague streets in 1989.
“There is a lot of hard work still to be done in this society,” Albert said. “I feel like I started something here that I want to finish.”

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com


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