- Henry A. Kissinger
Newly declassified State Department documents obtained by the National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act show that in October 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and high ranking U.S. officials gave their full support to the Argentine military junta and urged them to hurry up and finish the "dirty war" before the U.S. Congress cut military aid.
- Albert Einstein
This German born physicist is considered one of the world's greatest thinkers in history. Not only did he shape the way people think of time, space, matter, energy, and gravity but he also was a supporter of Zionism and peaceful living. Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm Germany, and spent most of his youth living in Munich, where his family owned a small electric machinery shop. He attended schooling in Munich, which he found unimaginative and dull.
- Anne Frank
Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (June 12, 1929 – early March 1945) was a Jewish girl who wrote a diary while in hiding with her family and four friends in Amsterdam during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, Frank and her family moved to Amsterdam in 1933, after the Nazis gained power in Germany, and were trapped by the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
- Ali Abunimah
Ali Hasan Abunimah is a Palestinian-American, born of a mother made a refugee in 1948 from the village of Lifta now in Israel, and a father from the village of Battir in the West Bank, who co-founded Electronic Intifada, a not-for-profit, independent online publication about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict from a Palestinian perspective. Abunimah has served as the Vice-President on the Board of Directors of the Arab American Action Network.
- Alexander Litvinenko
Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko (30 August 1962 – 23 November 2006) was a lieutenant-colonel in the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation and later a Russian dissident and writer. A son of a physician, Litvinenko was schooled in Nalchik, before being drafted into the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs as a private. After graduating in 1985 from the Kirov Higher Command School, he became a platoon commander in an Internal Troops regiment.
- Greg Palast
Greg Palast is a "New York Times"-bestselling author and a journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation as well as the British newspaper "The Observer", eg. among others:. His work frequently focuses on corporate malfeasance but has also been known to work with labor unions and consumer advocacy groups. Notably, he has claimed to have uncovered evidence that Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, …
- Jeremy Hinzman
Jeremy Hinzman (born in 1979 in Rapid City, South Dakota) is a former United States Army private from the 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In January of 2004, he fled the United States as one of nine American deserters openly seeking refugee status in Canada. On March 24, 2005 an immigration panel rejected Hinzman's claim, determining that he was not a conscientious objector and was thus ineligible for refugee status.
- Kareena Kapoor
Kareena Kapoor nicknamed "Bebo" is a four-time Filmfare Award-winning Indian popular actress who appears in Bollywood movies. Since her debut in the 2000 film, "Refugee", she has acted in nearly 30 films, majority of them bringing her critical success rather than commercial success. Despite this fact, she has emerged today as one of the top and most versatile actresses from the industry.
- Ahmed Zaoui
Ahmed Zaoui is an Algerian member of the Islamic Salvation Front who was convicted on terrorism-related charges in Belgium and France. He arrived in New Zealand on 4 December 2002 where he sought refugee status.
- Boris Berezovsky
Boris Abramovich Berezovsky a.k.a. Platon Elenin is a Russian-born billionaire. He emigrated to the UK in 2001, where he was granted political asylum.
- Patrick Moraz
Patrick Philippe Moraz (born June 24, 1948 in Villars-Ste-Croix, Morges, Switzerland) is a progressive rock keyboard player. He is best known as the keyboardist for the progressive rock band Yes, from 1974-1976, and the Moody Blues from 1978 - 1991. He was classically trained at the Conservatory of Lausanne, but played jazz primarily before entering progressive rock and has been highly acclaimed for his virtuosity.
- Peter Phillips
Peter Phillips is the Director of Project Censored. He is a fifth generation Californian, who grew up on a family farm near Lodi, California. His present occupations include being an Associate Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University, where he teaches classes in Media Censorship, Power, Class Stratification and Social Welfare.
- Hassan Almrei
A Syrian, Hassan Almrei arrived in Canada in 1999 claiming refugee-status. He used a false United Arab Emirates passport which hid his time spent in Afghanistan, and a Canadian visa which he bought on the black market for $5,000. He was arrested on a security certificate in October 2001, following a Royal Canadian Mounted Police search of his Toronto house in the wake of 9/11.
- Ishmael Beah
Ishmael Beah (b. 1980 in Sierra Leone) is the author of the memoir, "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier". In 1991, a vicious civil war overtook Sierra Leone. His parents and two brothers were killed; at the age of 13, he was pressed into service as a child soldier. He fought for almost three years before being rescued by UNICEF. In 1998, he fled from Freetown after the 1999 coup to New York City. He now calls his foster mother, Laura Simms, his mother.
- Bobby Fischer
Robert James "Bobby" Fischer is a United States-born chess Grandmaster who in 1972 became the only US-born chessplayer to become the official World Chess Champion. In 1974 he officially resigned the title when FIDE, the international chess federation, refused to accept his conditions for a title defense. He is a regular candidate in considerations of the greatest chess player of all time.
- Mullah Krekar
Najmuddin Faraj Ahmad, commonly known as Mullah Krekar, born July 7, 1956, is an Iraqi Kurd who came to Norway as a refugee from northern Iraq in 1991. His wife and four children have Norwegian citizenship, but not Krekar himself. He speaks Kurdish, Arabic, Norwegian and English. Krekar was the original leader of the Islamist armed group Ansar al-Islam, which was set up and commenced operations in Iraqi Kurdistan while he had refugee status in Norway.
- Fritz Lang
Friedrich Christian Anton Lang was an Austrian-German-American film director, screenwriter and occasional film producer, one of the best known "émigrés" from Germany's school of expressionism. His most famous films are the groundbreaking "Metropolis" (the world's most expensive silent film at the time of its release) and "M", made before he moved to the United States.
- J. P. Dutta
J P Dutta (born October 3, 1949 in Maharashtra, Bombay) is an Indian Bollywood film producer and director, Mr. Dutta produces his films under the banner of JP Films. He is known for directing many patriotic war films and films in the action genre. His films often have ensemble star casts. Some of the Bollywood Hindi films that he has written, produced and directed are "Border", "Refugee", "LOC Kargil" and "Umrao Jaan".
- Paul Fromm
Paul Fromm (1906-July 4, 1987) was a Chicago wine merchant and performing arts patron through the Fromm Music Foundation. The "Organum for Paul Fromm" was composed by John Harbison in his honor. Born in Kitzingen, Germany to a prominent family of vintners, Fromm was an early supporter of contemporary classical music in that country after he was exposed to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" in the early 1920s.
- Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg (born June 2, 1926) is one of the best-known and most distinguished of Holocaust historians. His three-volume, 1,273-page "The Destruction of the European Jews" is regarded as the seminal study of the Nazi Final Solution. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on April 26, 2005.
- Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall (Russian: Марк Захарович Шага́л; Belarusian: Мойша Захаравіч Шагалаў "Mojša Zacharavič Šahałaŭ") (7 July 1887 - 28 March 1985) was a French painter of Russian-Jewish origin who was born in Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. Among the celebrated painters of the 20th century, he is associated with the modern movements after impressionism.
- Graça Machel
Graça Machel is the widow of the late Mozambican president Samora Machel, who died in a plane crash over South Africa in 1986, and is the current wife of former South African president Nelson Mandela. She is the only woman to be first lady of two different nations. Born in rural Mozambique she attended Methodist Mission schools before gaining a scholarship to attend University of Lisbon in Portugal, where she first became involved in independence issues.
- Omar Deghayes
Omar Deghayes is a Libyan citizen with residency status in the United Kingdom, who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002. He is presently detained as an unlawful combatant in the United States Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. His lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith alleges that Deghayes was blinded by pepper spray inside the prison. Deghayes' father was a union organiser who was executed in Libya while Omar was still a child.
- Mariel Boatlift
The Mariel boatlift was a mass movement of Cubans who departed from Cuba's Mariel Harbor to the United States between April 15 and October 31, 1980. The boatlift was precipitated by a sharp downturn in the Cuban economy, leading to simmering internal tensions on the island and a bid by up to 10,000 Cubans to gain asylum in the Peruvian embassy. The Cuban government subsequently announced that anyone who wanted to leave could do so, …
- Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a Russian-American author. Nabokov wrote his first literary works in Russian, but rose to international prominence as a masterly prose English stylist for the novels he composed in the United States. He is also noted for having made significant contributions to lepidoptery and creating a number of chess problems. Nabokov's "Lolita" (1955) is frequently cited as his most important novel, …
- Cynthia Maung
Dr. Cynthia Maung is a Karen medical doctor who since 1989 has lived in Mae Sot, on the Thai-Burmese border. She left Burma (now Myanmar) after the 8888 Uprising and has since run a clinic treating Burmese refugees, migrants and orphans at Mae Tao Clinic in Mae Sot on the Thai-Burmese border, together with 100 paramedics and teachers.
- Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder was an Austrian-born, Jewish-American journalist, screenwriter, film director, and producer whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age. Many of Wilder's films achieved both critical and public acclaim.
- Georg Solti
Sir Georg Solti, KBE (pronounced) (21 October, 1912 - 5 September, 1997) was a world-renowned Hungarian-British orchestral and operatic conductor.
- Anu Malik
Anu Malik is a music director in the Hindi (or Bollywood) film industry. He has won the National Award for his work in "Refugee". His song "Chamma Chamma" from "China Gate" was used in the English movie "Moulin Rouge", starring Nicole Kidman, and "Chunari Chunari" from "Biwi No.1" was used in "Monsoon Wedding". With his work in crossover films like "Bride and Prejudice", …
- Steve McCurry
Photographer Steve McCurry is renowned for his evocative and moving photographs of Asia and its people. His career reached a turning point in the 1980s when, disguised in native garb, he crossed into Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. And in 1984, while visiting an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan, he took his famous "Afghan girl" photograph, which became a National Geographic icon after it was published on the cover of the June 1985 issue.
- Mahmud Abouhalima
Mahmud Abouhalima is a convicted perpetrator of the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing. His red hair earned him the nickname Mahmud the Red. Born to a mill foreman in Kafr Dawar, Egypt, Abouhalima spent his adolescence with the Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, an outlawed Islamic group that heralded Omar Abdel Rahman as their spiritual leader. He briefly attended Alexandria University, but dropped out and left Egypt altogether in 1981.
- Lee Jackson
Keith "Lee" Jackson (born 8 January 1943, in Newcastle upon Tyne) is a British bass player and singer, best known for his work in The Nice. Jackson rose to prominence in the 1960s in the progressive rock group The Nice with keyboardist Keith Emerson and drummer Brian Davison. He subsequently formed Jackson Heights and then Refugee, the latter with Davison and keyboardist Patrick Moraz. Jackson had a hoarse singing voice and an almost percussive bass playing style.
- Akhmed Zakayev
Akhmed Khalidovich Zakayev is the Foreign Minister of Chechen Republic government-in-exile, appointed by the President Aslan Maskhadov shortly after his 1997 election, and again in 2006 by Abdul Halim Sadulayev.
- Cap Anamur
Cap Anamur is an organisation which is helping refugees worldwide. In 1979 Christel and Rupert Neudeck, together with a group of friends, formed the committee "A ship for Vietnam" and chartered for the rescue mission the freighter "Cap Anamur" named after a cape off the Turkish coast.
- Comenius
John Amos Comenius (latinized: "Iohannes Amos Comenius") (March 28, 1592 - November 15, 1670) was a Czech teacher, scientist, educator, and writer. He was a Unity of the Brethren/Moravian Protestant bishop, a religious refugee, and one of the earliest champions of universal education, a concept eventually set forth in his book "Didactica Magna". Comenius became known as the "teacher of nations".
- William Shawcross
William Shawcross (born 28 May, 1946, Sussex) is a British writer, broadcaster and commentator. Shawcross was educated at Eton College and University College, Oxford, and worked as a journalist for the "Sunday Times". He writes and lectures on issues of international policy, geopolitics, Southeast Asia and refugees for a number of publications, including "Time Magazine", "Newsweek", "International Herald Tribune", "The Spectator", …
- Robert Maxwell
Ian Robert Maxwell MC (June 10, 1923 – November 5, 1991) was a Czechoslovakian-born British media proprietor and formerly Member of Parliament (MP), who rose from poverty to build an extensive publishing empire.
- James C. Hathaway
James C. Hathaway is an eminent Canadian/American legal scholar in the field of international refugee law. His work is regularly cited by senior courts of common law countries. He is director of the University of Michigan’s Program in Refugee and Asylum Law, Senior Visiting Research Associate at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Program, and president of the Universidad Internacional Menendez Pelayo's Cuenca Colloquium on International Refugee Law.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (April 26, 1889 in Vienna, Austria - April 29, 1951 in Cambridge, England) was an Austrian philosopher who contributed several ground-breaking ideas to philosophy, primarily in the foundations of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. His influence has been wide-ranging, placing him among the most significant philosophers of the 20th century.
- Lucian Freud
Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH (born 8 December 1922) is a British painter and printmaker. Freud was born in Berlin, Germany in 1922, son of Jewish parents Ernst Ludwig Freud, an architect, and Lucie née Brasch. He is the grandson of Sigmund Freud and brother of writer and politician Clement Raphael Freud and of Stephan Gabriel Freud. Freud and his family moved to the UK in 1933 due to the rise of Nazism, gaining British citizenship in 1939.