By Richard
Conklin '59M.A.
Barbara Frey, a 1978 Notre Dame graduate, has never owned or
discharged a firearm, but she can confidently refer to "hand-held
under-barrel and mounted grenade launchers" and is among the world's
leading experts on how small arms and light weapons impact international
human rights.
The 47-year-old attorney is an assistant professor at the University
of Minnesota and director of the human rights program in its Institute
for Global Studies. In 2000 she became an alternate to the 26-member
United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection
of Human Rights. Thus began her education in such matters as heavy
machine guns, recoilless rifles and mortars of calibers of less
than 100mm.
While headlines worry about nuclear arms and chemical and biological
agents, the "new weapons of mass destruction," Frey points out,
are those designed for personal or small-crew use. "Circulating
throughout the globe are an estimated 550 million small arms that
cause at least 500,000 deaths a year, perhaps double that in injuries,
including a disproportionately high number among civilians and
children," she says. Misuse of small arms throughout the world
by state agents, paramilitary groups, insurgents and terrorists
exacerbate human rights issues from rape to forced recruitment
of children soldiers. Her study on this issue has prompted the
United Nations to commission an extended investigation on how
the international community can regulate small arms traffic.
Frey is somewhat defensive about sitting behind a desk in a
campus social science tower. "Theory and research are critical
to human rights work," she says, "but I like to balance it off
with real issues." As a Notre Dame undergraduate, she spent an
eye-opening summer of community organizing in Oakland, California,
where she rallied neighborhoods to demand better trash removal
and police protection.
Sister Jean Lenz, OSF, '67M.A., assistant vice president for
student affairs, recalls Frey as the kind of leader "who didn't
become president of an existing organization but instead liked
to start things from scratch." One of those things was women's
basketball, which Frey, a 5-8 forward, began at the club level
in the pioneer days of coeducation. She has coached her daughter,
Maddie, on a community recreational team that sported Ruth Riley
headbands and "went manic" watching the Irish win the 2001 NCAA
championship. Even today, Lenz notes, a conversation with Frey
is apt to veer from, say, immigration issues to the coaching style
of Muffet McGraw.
After Frey earned a law degree from the University of Wisconsin,
she spent six months in Santiago, Chile, working with the country's
Catholic human rights organization, the only bulwark for human
rights against the oppressive regime of General Augusto Pinochet.
That experience solidified her belief in a church where the dignity
of the individual was an institutional value. She then joined
a Minneapolis law firm, only to become founding secretary (starting
things from scratch again) of a small group of lawyers that evolved
into one of the largest human rights organizations in the country,
Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights. As its executive director
from 1985 to 1997, her travels on behalf of cross-cultural human
rights in those years included Chile, Greece, Switzerland, Argentina,
the Philippines, Poland, Albania, Brazil, Austria and China.
Family considerations dictated a partial return to home base
seven years ago. In addition to her professorial responsibilities,
she has been a private international human relations consultant,
with clients ranging from The MacArthur Foundation to the International
Labour Office. A few years ago she taught human rights to fourth-,
fifth- and sixth-graders at a Saint Paul magnet school. "The youngsters
even formed an extracurricular group on their own," she recalls
with pride. "They called it HOPE -- Helping Other People Everywhere."
Frey enjoys an extensive network of friends and acquaintances,
all bound together by human rights concerns. Many of her friends
are at Notre Dame, where she chaired an advisory committee for
the Center for Social Concerns when Father Don McNeill, CSC, '58,
was director. "Barb was a lover and challenger of Notre Dame in
the area of peace and justice," he says. "She had a personal dynamism
and great discernment."
If there is a subject that brings a slight set to Frey's jaw,
it is the plight of women in much of the underdeveloped world.
"Education of women is the key to so much," she says, "not only
elimination of human rights abuses directed at women, but also
on larger issues such as poverty and health."
The concern over human rights in America has heightened these
days, but Frey doesn't believe politics here will trump such rights.
"Denial of significant human rights in our country has never worked,"
she says. "If an idea is right, it cannot be turned back. We should
see human rights as a cornerstone of national security."
* * *
Dick Conklin retired as associate vice president of University
Relations at Notre Dame and now lives in Mendota Heights, Minesota.
(April 2004)
