Freedom fighter: meet the 'very focused, and tough' Nina Shea.

'NO bullets, no lies--you can't hide; it's genocide!"

Back in August, on a sweltering Washington day, roughly 50 people picketed in front of Sudan's embassy. They had assembled to denounce the Khartoum government and its grotesque human-rights abuses in Darfur. The noontime demonstration had been a daily routine on Massachusetts Avenue since late June; every Friday, an act of civil disobedience was staged. On this particular day, a Catholic priest would be arrested in solidarity with the Sudanese.

Shortly after 12:30, a blonde wearing shades strolled confidently up to the protesters. She greeted the organizers, conversed with clergymen in attendance, and then, before a crowd grown silent, delivered a damning account of Khartoum's atrocities. She urged divestment from oil companies funding Gen. Omar Bashir's reign of terror, and called for Sudan's removal from the U.N. Human Rights Commission. With her remarks concluded, and the priest locked away in the paddy wagon, the protesters began to disband; she mingled with the lingering ones, discussing the crisis.

Sound exhausting? For Nina Shea, it's all in a day's work.

Shea is the director of the Center for Religious Freedom (part of Freedom House, America's oldest human-rights group), and vice chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. She is not your stereotypical "human-rights activist": no leftist hunger-striking protester here. Shea is impassioned yet savvy, an experienced legal mind, and a symbol of how the quest for worldwide human rights and religious freedom is increasingly the purview of the right-leaning. She is known especially for her advocacy in behalf of Christians (rare within the human-rights establishment); in 1997, Shea's first book, In the Lion's Den, won her recognition from Newsweek for "making Christian persecution Washington's hottest cause." Indeed, it was Christianity that prompted Shea to work for human rights in the first place: "I'm a Catholic, and I see it as my vocation."

This inspiration explains Shea's intense, and long, commitment to her cause. A native of Pennsylvania, educated at Smith College and American University's School of Law, Shea initially pursued traditional law-firm practice before finding fulfillment in humanrights law. Her first client was the great Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov; next were the desaparecidos in El Salvador, then Romanian family-reunification cases, then South Africa--and Nicaragua. It was her expose of the Sandinistas, and the ensuing backlash from the American Left, that turned Shea away from her liberal-Democratic politics and the International League for Human Rights. In 1986 she married writer and editor Adam Meyerson (they have three children) and helped establish the Puebla Institute--which evolved into the Center for Religious Freedom, and merged with Freedom House in 1995. Throughout Shea's career, the scope of her work has known no limit: She has fought in behalf of religious minorities nearly everywhere, from the Falun Gong in China to Muslim dissidents in Iran.

And for nearly everyone in Sudan, one of Shea's most heavily targeted oppressor regimes. Now, because of Darfur, Sudan has finally captured the world's attention; Shea, however, had been a vociferous critic of General Bashir's regime long before the current crisis. She was on the case during his first murderous campaign, against black Christians and animists in the south, where some 2 million died and another 5 million were displaced.

During that genocide, Shea cobbled together a coalition of religious and other leaders united in seeking an end to the atrocities. She testified several times before Congress, and took her case to the Clinton White House, where she met resistance on what administration officials had designated a "backburner issue." Undeterred, she wrote in 1998 an attention-grabbing op-ed in the Wall Street Journal documenting Khartoum's jihad against non-Muslims and pleading for the world to end its indifference. Shea found an important ally in George W. Bush; under his leadership, "one thing led to another," and peace protocols halting the violence were finally signed in June.

Shea's longtime attention to Sudan helped with the early classification of the Darfur situation--as another genocide. She was instrumental in bringing the slaughter there to the attention of American policymakers and international human-rights organizations. The results have been historic: In September, Colin Powell declared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "evidence leads us to the conclusion that genocide has occurred and may still be occurring in Darfur." According to Shea, it was the first time a party to the 1948 Genocide Convention had "formally charged another party with 'genocide' and invoked the convention's provisions while genocide has been in progress."

While Darfur has loomed large in recent months, it has hardly been Shea's only priority: She has also worked doggedly to ensure the protection of religious minorities under the new Iraqi constitution. On that same afternoon--barely an hour after her Sudan-embassy speech--Shea meets with Eden Naby, an Assyrian Christian and an advocate for the ChaldoAssyrian community.

That community is not faring well. Under Saddam Hussein, many Iraqi Christians were exiled and killed; while the removal of the Baathist regime led to some immediate improvements, these Christians have a long way to go before attaining real security and freedom. Because they are concentrated in the north of Iraq, they face oppression especially from the Kurds, who see the Assyrians as a threat to their territorial control. The abduction of ChaldoAssyrian women is commonplace, the destruction is widespread--and government leaders disavow the brutality while secretly supplying those who perpetrate it.

The plight of Iraq's religious minorities is a familiar subject for Shea. Last fall, when she and her colleagues saw that the first draft of the Iraqi constitution lacked any provision for religious freedom in its bill of rights, "we almost dropped dead," Shea recalls, well aware of what unprotected religious minorities endure in extremist Muslim societies. So they worked through Senate offices--especially with Republicans Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback--to push for religious protections for individuals. But the constitution's second draft included only group rights, which, in the Middle East, are little better than none at all: "For Muslims, it means that the only people who really have rights ... to religious freedom are the clergy." Finally, on the third round, at the last minute, Shea & Co. succeeded in having individual religious rights enshrined in Iraqi law.

Still, the struggle for religious freedom in Iraq is ongoing. So Shea listens to Naby attentively, offering tips for getting her cause on U.S. officials' agendas--from writing about the situation to speaking before a Senate committee. "What we try to do," Shea explains, "is rely on the facts that are provided to us from trusted groups that we work with. And then our 'value added' is that we have contacts and experience in official Washington to try to raise the profiles of these issues ... to give [these groups] help in advancing their causes, by strategizing with them."

Often it is an uphill battle. The Hudson Institute's Michael Horowitz, who has worked extensively with Shea, says there is an institutional bias in the Washington foreign-policy establishment that shuns this kind of sustained commitment to human rights. "The drill is: sign a piece of paper, declare victory, move on to the next issue"--with protections of religious freedom often sacrificed in the process. Shea points to the constitution of Afghanistan as an example: "Religious freedom was never guaranteed in that bill of rights; and now Afghan Muslims are being, and have been, arrested under the Karzai government for blasphemy."

Shea sees extreme Islam--especially as manifested in the state-imposed application of sharia law--as one of the largest threats to religious freedom worldwide (along with persecution in the remaining Communist regimes, particularly China and Vietnam). A few months ago, Shea and Center for Religious Freedom senior fellow Paul Marshall completed a book (Radical Islam's Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Sharia Law, to be released early next year) documenting sharia's abuses in seven Muslim countries. They are also attentive to radical Islam here: The center recently concluded a study of pamphlets circulated in mosques throughout the United States bearing the official stamp of the Saudi government--documents disseminating hate and promoting intolerance among America's Muslims.

In her ongoing struggle against this extremist Islam and other manifestations of religious persecution, Shea has developed a reputation for her knowledge and reliability. Virginia representative Frank Wolf calls her "very focused, and tough" (citing her success in getting the religious-freedom commission formed--over the objections of many in the business community--as an example). Barrett Duke, a member of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission--which recently awarded Shea its John Leland religious-freedom prize--says that having Shea join his efforts in behalf of North Korean religious freedom "automatically advanced the cause."

Duke gives some of the credit to Shea's effectiveness, which, he says, engenders respect in America's halls of power: "Nina works within the parameters that government allows, but she's not afraid to speak out against government intransigence." Part of her success, he says, comes from "knowing when to play along, and knowing when to put her foot down. She does that superbly, and this is why she's as effective as she is, and why government officials still listen to her." In addition to Shea's shrewdness, Duke also lauds the depth of her commitment, a sentiment echoed by New Jersey representative Christopher Smith, vice chairman of the House Committee on International Relations. He recounts how when--in his view--the Clinton administration "sold out the best and the brightest in China," Shea was "sick at heart."

In the course of Smith's work on China, the dissident Wei Jingsheng told him, "The stronger and more clear you are on human rights, the less we get beaten in prison. They do respect strength." Shea's strength in support of human rights is respected worldwide; she is crystal clear on the non-negotiability of religious freedom--and, says Horowitz, of getting the political establishment to recognize it as "a core element of freedom itself."

Meghan Clyne is a reporter at the New York Sun.