Healing
Kennedy said that President Elect Joe Biden was perfectly positioned to bring healing because of his compassion and heart.
Shifting the paradigm on huge income inequality would be a huge challenge, she continued, because the financial system allowed consolidation of wealth.
The large voter turnout in the recent US election strengthened democracy, Kennedy said.
Kerry Kennedy is President of Robert F Kennedy Human Rights – a foundation that has worked for the pursuit of equal justice, the protection and promotion of basic rights, and the preservation of the rule of law.
A graduate of Brown University and Boston Law School, she is a member of the Bar of both Massachusetts and District of Columbia and holds numerous honorary doctorates.
Kennedy has called for the defunding of the police in the US.
Accountability
“Part of that is police accountability,” she told the IBA conference this week.
Many cities spend up to 40% of their budgets on policing, she said, but fewer than 1% of murderers end up in jail, and less than 15% of rapists are imprisoned.
Some of that funding should be taken to make police really great at what they are doing, and the rest put into education, housing, mental-health care, job training and job readiness.
Every New York city school now has a police officer assigned permanently, she said.
“That does not seem to me to be the way to build safety and security and hope and anti-racism and a better future.”
Kennedy has campaigned against the death penalty since 1981 and said that its resumption at US federal level is very damaging, domestically and internationally.
“Basing our criminal system on revenge is a part of the problem,” she said, calling for real leadership towards a more peaceful and compassionate way to grapple with these serious issues.
“God forbid any of us should be judged by the worst decision we ever made in our entire lives,” she said.
Death row
“And that’s what we do to people on death row.”
Explaining her interest in human rights, the daughter of Robert Kennedy said: “I have ten brothers and sisters, I’m the seventh of 11 and when you come that far down the line, you get a very keen interest in human rights at a very young age.”
She recalled her father's work in the Department of Justice as exposing her to the unpaid work of human-rights volunteer lawyers.
“And I thought, I want to be like them, and so I went to law school to become a human-rights lawyer.”
Kennedy said that all concerned citizens should demand better governments and reflect on our duties and capacities to create change.
“Having worked in human rights for so many years, the difference between a victim and a hero is activism.
Agency
“It’s the belief that I have the agency, that I can do something about this.”
That is something that needs to be taught in schools, in homes and in places of worship, she continued.
“Each of us has gifts that we have been given.
"And we can use those gifts to make the world a more just and peaceful place.”