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Bartolome de las Casas: An early human rights worker
Bartolome de las Casas is one of those remarkable people in history who arose at the very beginning of the modern human rights movement. A great humanitarian; he learnt human rights in his encounter with the people of Central and South America during the sixteenth century European invasion of the Americas. He used his office as Dominican friar and later Bishop to uphold the human rights of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Las Casas came to the America’s as part of the colonial expeditions from Spain, arriving in 1502 in Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), at the very beginning of the encounter between the Europeans and the people of the Americas.…