Bill Schulz

Senior Fellow

From the refugee camps of Darfur, Sudan, to the poorest villages in India; from the prison cells of Monrovia, Liberia, to the business suites of Hong Kong to Louisiana’s death row, Dr. William F. Schulz has traveled the globe in pursuit of a world free from human rights violations. As Executive Director of Amnesty International USA from 1994 to 2006, Dr. Schulz headed the American section of the world’s oldest and largest international human rights organization. As a Senior Fellow at American Progress in Washington, D.C., he works in the area of religion and public policy and oversees a project designed to provide a blueprint for human rights policy for the next U.S. administration. During 2006 to 2007 he served as a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

During his 12 years at Amnesty, Dr. Schulz led missions to Liberia, Tunisia, Northern Ireland, and Sudan and visited other places as diverse as Cuba and Mongolia. He also traveled tens of thousands miles in the United States, spreading the human rights message from campuses to boardrooms to civic organizations. A frequent guest on television programs such as Good Morning, America, The Today Show, Hardball and Nightline, Dr. Schulz is the author of two books on human rights, In Our Own Best Interest: How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All (2001, Beacon Press) and Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights (2003, Nation Books); the contributing editor of The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary (2007, University of Pennsylvania Press) and is regularly quoted in the New York Times and other national publications. All of this prompted the New York Review of Books to say in 2002, “William Schulz has done more than anyone in the American human rights movement to make human rights issues known in the United States.”

An ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, Dr. Schulz came to Amnesty after serving for 15 years with the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, the last eight (1985 to 1993) as President of the Association. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Oberlin College, holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago and the Doctor of Ministry degree from Meadville/Lombard Theological School at the University of Chicago as well as seven honorary degrees.