Amnesty International regional director to discuss death penalty at Bates College

Joshua Rubenstein, the Northeast regional director of Amnesty International USA, visits Bates College to discuss the death penalty at 7 p.m. Monday, March 22, in Chase Hall Lounge, Campus Avenue.

The talk, sponsored by the campus chapter of Amnesty International, is open to the public at no charge.

Rubenstein’s talk is titled The Death Penalty: Is It Really a Human Rights Issue or Just Another Government Program? He’ll examine the death penalty as a challenge to both advocates and opponents of capital punishment, the risks of condemning innocent prisoners and the possibility of its abolition in the United States.

Rubenstein has been a staff member of Amnesty International USA since 1975. As Northeast regional director, he supervises Amnesty membership in New England, New York and New Jersey. He has testified against the death penalty before state legislatures in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut.

Rubenstein is an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights (Beacon Press, 1980); Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (Basic Books, 1996); and, with Vladimir Naumov, is co-editor of Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (Yale University Press, in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; 2001).