In many respects, the international human rights movement hasn’t fully entered the American consciousness yet, in terms of knowing what rights we can claim as American citizens and what rights we can claim just by virtue of being human beings. There are so many overlaps and distinctions. Many of us don't know what human rights mean in the United States.
For instance, if we look at the situation of the disproportionate number of minorities, especially African Americans, who are incarcerated today in U.S. prisons, most people probably wouldn’t see that immediately as a human rights issue. We would probably label it first as a civil rights issue – and think of it as a way that racial inequality is expressing itself today as a more subtle form of Jim Crow justice.
When we think of federal agents making an impromptu raid on a manufacturing plant in Massachusetts to round up undocumented, mostly Hispanic immigrants and ship them to remote detention centers, we probably wouldn’t call it a human rights issue either. We would probably think of it first as falling somewhere at the intersection of domestic labor and immigration laws.
Today, as part of an effort to honor Human Rights Day, I represented UUSC at the ACLU-Massachusetts’s roundtable discussion on the U.S. government’s 2007 report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. State parties to the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), like the United States, are required to make periodic reports to the U.N. committee that contain a fair and honest assessment of the situation of racial discrimination in their country.
The United States’ 2007 report was basically a whitewash, saying racism is not a problem in the United States – which gave activists an opportunity to call the government out on its deplorable record on racial equality, given not just the Katrina disaster, but also the host of statistics out there on race and poverty in the U.S. and disproportionate rates of imprisonment and infant mortality, low levels of education, low levels of employment, lack of access to medical care, increased risk of being the victim of a violent crime, and lack of access to legal counsel among minorities... all of which points to national practices that systematically violate CERD's promise of equal rights.
This turned our discussion to how people whose rights have been violated and activists on a local level can draw on the powerful vocabulary of international human rights law to call for higher standards and better treatment. This could mean, for instance, in the case of a hostile school environment that contributes to high drop-out rates and low education levels among minorities, calling this a violation of the “Right to Dignity” as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It could also mean calling inferior medical treatment for minorities a violation of the "Right to Health" under UDHR, as well as a violation of CERD.
For all involved, Human Rights Day became an opportunity to further ground ourselves in the assurances of human rights law and encourage more people to frame their demands in terms of human rights – in order to strengthen their present claims as well as to strengthen the universal claim to human rights by everyone.
So, in keeping with the spirit of Human Rights Day, can I recommend that you take a minute to look through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights right now, and as an exercise, try to pick out which right in your opinion is most in need of defense in America today? Is it Article 5, torture? Article 9, arbitrary detention? Article 23, the right to work? Article 25, the right to a standard of living? Please post your picks. We'd like to hear them.
In many respects, the international human rights movement hasn’t fully entered the American consciousness yet, in terms of knowing what rights we can claim as American citizens and what rights we can claim just by virtue of being human beings. There are so many overlaps and distinctions. Many of us don't know what human rights mean in the United States.