Human rights champ

学生時代に研究室や授業でUG先生が度々話をしてくださった土井香苗さんがThe Japan Timesの記事で採り上げられていました。知識がつながる瞬間はやはり嬉しいですね。
ちなみに見出しのchampはUmeさんがすでに採り上げられた「（弱者・主義などの）擁護者，支持者」のchampionです。（Koyamamoto）

Human rights champ Doi battles social injustice in Japan
The way most Japanese see it, human rights are such an integral part of society now that it’s simply impossible to think the public would ever forfeit them.
Or would they?
Contrary to popular belief, it appears that human rights in Japan are increasingly being put in jeopardy.
Families on welfare were dealt a blow last August when the government forged ahead with the largest benefit cuts since the end of the war.
Ethnic Korean residents in Tokyo’s Shin-Okubo district are still being terrorized by racist protests in Korea Town.
And among the more than 3,700 people in Japan interviewed for asylum requests last year, only six were granted refugee status.
Despite all this negative news, many Japanese remain unfazed. They tend to think such predicaments are someone else’s problem, the events of people far less privileged and far more marginalized than they are, according to Kanae Doi, founder and head of the Tokyo headquarters of Human Rights Watch.
“It’s not that Japanese people are incapable of identifying with them. It’s just they have never been on the side of minorities themselves so they simply don’t know what it feels like” to be discriminated against, Doi, 38, said in a recent interview with The Japan Times.
But even in a supposed democracy like Japan, she said, there is a tiny portion of socially marginalized people who feel they are being neglected or discriminated against based on their ethnicity, sexual orientation or economic background.
Looking back on her life, the University of Tokyo graduate said she has always felt a responsibility to help protect minorities.
In 1996, Doi, then 21, became the youngest person to pass the national bar exam. The following year, she set out on a journey to Eritrea, which was then a fledgling Horn of Africa country that had just declared independence in 1993 to end 30 years of annexation under neighboring Ethiopia.
She spent a year there as an international legal volunteer to help lay the groundwork for enacting its criminal laws.
Despite her best efforts, however, just three years after Doi returned to Japan, Eritrea fell under the rule of dictator Isaias Afwerki in 2001.
The 2013 press freedom index released by Reporters Without Borders ranks Eritrea near the bottom of the list at No. 179 — one notch lower than North Korea.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/04/06/national/human-rights-champ-doi-battles-social-injustice-in-japan/#.U0KR3CjQFQI