International Service and Human Rights
Throughout his career as a member of the California State Assembly, Mayor of San Francisco, HUD Regional Director as well a private citizen; Agnos has traveled to foreign countries to advocate on behalf of human rights as well as to help foster democracy and political reform in nations seeking to improve their modern government.

His experience and insight in these areas led to a requests by the U.S. Secretary of State for Agnos to lecture and participate in seminars for mayors and local officials in Diyarbakir, Turkey in 1998.
Additional requests came from the the National Democratic Institute (NDI) to conduct citizen participation seminars for citizen groups and government officials in Luanda, Angola in 1998; to co-chair an international election commission with a member of the Namibian Parliament to assess, advise and report on the readiness of various stakeholders (i.e. UN officials, political parties, media, election officials, police, NGO’s etc.) who were to be involved in the first democratic elections in Sierra Leone since the end of their 20 year civil war; to present disaster preparedness and response lectures to the first local government citizens advisory committee established by Palestinian officials in Bethlehem in 2002 after military incursions; and to lead government seminars on citizen empowerment and disaster response in Beijing and Fuzhou, China in 2004.

In 1996 he was invited by the first democratically mayor of Seoul, Korea to provide the keynote address on the 500th anniversary of that city. In 1995, he was a part of a small delegation sponsored by the Asia Foundation to conduct a series of seminars on constituent service and election campaigns for first time officials in the Russian Far East Cities of Habarovsk and Vladivostok.

Art was also asked by the San Francisco Catholic Human Rights Committee to participate in a human rights mission to Nicaragua and El Salvador in 1984 where they investigated political oppression against religious leaders and citizen activists and by the Bay Area Council for Soviet Jews to meet and negotiate for Jewish refusniks threatened by the Soviet government in Moscow and Leningrad (1986).

In his first year as mayor of San Francisco (1988), he flew to Guatemala to discuss specific immigration and refugee issues with government and private officials. During ensuing years, he also led San Francisco City delegations to meet and confer with partners in Taipei (Taiwan), Shanghai (China), Tokyo and Osaka (Japan), and Salonika, Greece where he opened new markets and his Sister City program was named the nation’s leader in fostering business cooperation. In 1990, he was asked by the White House to host Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev for his only visit to an American city outside of Washington, D.C.

In other official visits abroad, Agnos, as Chair of the California Assembly Committee on Immigration and Refugee Policy, led a delegation of California state legislators to study and report on Vietnamese and Hmong refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines (1985).

 

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