William F. Schulz

Senior Fellow

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Dr. William F. Schulz has traveled the globe in pursuit of a world free from human rights violations. He has traveled from the refugee camps of Darfur, Sudan, to the poorest villages in India, and from the prison cells of Monrovia, Liberia, to the business suites of Hong Kong and Louisiana’s death row. 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 the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., he specializes in human rights policy. The author of CAP's recent  "Strategic Persistence: How the United States Can Help Improve Human Rights in China," he is the contributing editor The Future of Human Rights:  U.S. Policy for a New Era, published in 2008 by the University of Pennsylvania Press in collaboration with CAP, which lays out recommendations for the Obama administration in all areas of human rights policy.

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 of 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). He is also the contributing editor of The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary (2007, University of Pennsylvania Press). 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 and holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago as well as a doctorate of ministry degree from Meadville/Lombard Theological School at the University of Chicago and seven honorary degrees.