Blood for Profit: Holding Transnational Companies Responsible Ka Hsaw Wa Winter 2004 --, --, Caltech This event is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.

Biography

Ka Hsaw Wa, an advocate for the ethnic and rural minorities of Burma, has endured imprisonment and torture to document the oppression, discrimination, and abuse of the people of Burma. First as a student activist and later as a human rights monitor, he has founded two organizations and taught hundreds of people how to investigate, document, and expose human rights abuses. His first-hand knowledge of the international forces that sustain human rights abuses led him to file a precedent-setting, class-action law suit in the United States against an oil company allegedly complicit in the Burmese military's abuse of human rights.Ka Hsaw Wa is the founder of EarthRights International, an organization that documents government-sponsored human rights abuses in Burma. His work has led to substantial publications documenting government and military abuses of ethnic suppression, including systematic rape and forced labor.

In addition, Ka Hsaw Wa co-founded the Karen Human Rights Group to disseminate information to international human rights groups on abuses against the Karen ethnic minority of Burma. Detained and tortured several times, Ka Hsaw Wa was forced to flee Rangoon, and has worked under cover in areas "off-limits" to international agencies. He has traveled thousands of miles on foot throughout Burma to interview and record testimony of victims and witnesses of human rights abuses.

For more information, also see the EarthRights International website: http://www.earthrights.org/.