By Jim Lobe

Thursday 11 December 2003

(IPS) - Key U.S. civil liberties and social justice groups marked International Human Rights Day Wednesday by launching a new "U.S. Human Rights Network" dedicated to raising awareness about international human rights standards and focusing attention on the U.S. failure to enforce them.

More than 50 groups, ranging from the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU) to the New York-based Centre for Economic and Social Rights (CESR), said they had agreed to join forces to address what they said was "the alarming rate of human rights violations in the U.S.",
particularly as it pursues its "war on terrorism".

They called for U.S. citizens to speak out against these abuses, as
well as to fight "U.S. exceptionalism", the view pushed strongly by the
administration of President George W. Bush, that the United States
should not be constrained by international law or human rights
standards, especially relating to economic and social rights.
"The demonstrations that we are currently seeing against the U.S.
around the world are a reaction to the perception that the U.S. -- and
particularly the Bush administration -- thinks that it is above
international law -- laws the rest of the world are required to abide
by," said Ajamu Baraka, who works for Amnesty International USA's
(AIUSA) Atlanta office and is part of the network's secretariat.

"The rights of ordinary Americans and others residing in the U.S.
are being trampled on a daily basis -- in violation of a host of
international laws and standards," said Cathy Albisa, a secretariat
member who is based at CESR.

"These include the right to economic security and a decent standard
of living, the right of children convicted of crimes not to be executed,
the right to a fair trial, the right to seek asylum, and the right to be
free from torture and cruel and inhuman treatment, among any others,"
she added, noting that the U.S. has the developed world's highest child
poverty rate and that 20 percent of adults are functionally illiterate.

The network, which has been several years in the making, marks its
birth from a meeting last year at Howard University in Washington, DC on
the subject of "Ending Exceptionalism: Strengthening Human Rights in the
United States".

Most of the network's founding organisations -- which include
advocacy groups for immigrants, ethnic minorities, welfare recipients,
the disabled, prison rights, among others -- took part in the
conference, organising themselves into specific caucuses regarding such
issues as the death penalty, discrimination and sovereignty.

Among the best-known groups are the ACLU, the American Friends
Service Committee, AIUSA, the Centre for Constitutional Rights, Human
Rights Watch, the Indian Law Resource Centre, the Kensington Welfare
Rights Union, the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and
the National Association for the Advanced of Coloured People Defence
Education Fund.

The network is to be guided by six "core principles", including
acceptance that that all rights enumerated in the U.N.'s Universal
Declaration of Human Rights are interdependent and universal; that they
include economic, social, and cultural (ESC) rights, as well civil and
political rights that are generally given more recognition in the U.S.;
and that rights are most effectively protected through building social
movements whose leadership should be accountable to those who are most
directly affected by their work.

These principles challenge the work of a number of major U.S.-based
human rights groups, many of which have historically been dominated by
professional elites and have generally ignored ESC rights, in part
because of their failure to accept the Universal Declaration and
international human rights law as a sufficient juridical basis for their
work. They have tended instead to rely on the rights provided under the
U.S. Constitution.

In recent years, however, U.S. courts -- even the Supreme Court --
have increasingly cited international human rights standards in their
decisions regarding, for example, the death penalty for juveniles and
the mentally retarded, women's rights, and the accountability of U.S.
companies for wrongful conduct overseas.

Many of the network groups have been pushing courts in this
direction. "The ACLU decided several years ago to integrate more
international principles in our work," said Gregory Nojeim, a staff
attorney who represents the ACLU in the network.

"A lot of groups that have traditionally focused on political and
civil rights have expanded their mandates," said Albisa, who cited both
Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, which has produced a number of reports
on cases where civil and political rights have intersected with ESR
rights, such as the impact of practices by multi-national corporations
on local communities.

"There's a growing recognition that you cannot separate economic
rights from political and civil liberties," she added, noting that
groups that have tried to use international law to broaden the panoply
of rights recognised in the U.S. have until now been fragmented.

"We are pulling together in a way that can build movements," she
said. The network's launch is the first step.

Both the inclusion of ESC rights into the broader human rights
pantheon and the use of international human rights law by U.S. courts
are anathema to the Bush administration and key policy-makers, about two
dozen of whom are members of the Federalist Society for Law and Public
Policy, a legal association whose recent national convention here
featured half a dozen major presentations on the dangers allegedly posed
to U.S. national sovereignty by international human rights standards
that have not been ratified by the U.S. government.

Among others, the Society was addressed by White House Chief of
Staff Andrew Card, Attorney General John Ashcroft, U.N. Ambassador John
Negroponte, and the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and
International Security John Bolton, who argued that the International
Criminal Court (ICC) represented a particularly grave threat to U.S.
sovereignty and that Washington obtained all the legitimacy it needed in
invading Iraq by following its own Constitutional processes rather than
deferring to the U.N. Security Council.

This kind of "exceptionalism" is precisely what the network is
trying to organise against, however.

"As the U.S. indulges an increasingly unilateralist bent in both
domestic and foreign policy, the cost to rights at home and abroad is
growing," said Baraka, who noted the rise in racial profiling, the
summary detention and deportation of Muslim immigrants after Sep. 11,
2001, and the indefinite detention as "illegal combatants" at the U.S.
naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of hundreds of foreigners seized in
Afghanistan and elsewhere as examples.

The international human rights framework, including ESC rights, he
said, remains under-utilised in the U.S. "due in large part to a
deliberate, long-standing effort by the U.S. government to deny human
rights laws and standards when it applies to situations internal to the
U.S. and to U.S. actions around the world".

Washington's exceptionalist policy has been most vividly on display
in the administration's refusal to request ratification of the
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against
Women (CEDAW); its renunciation of the ICC treaty; its withdrawal from
the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty; its walkout at the World Conference Against Racism; and its failure to adhere to the Geneva Conventions protecting prisoners of war, according to the network.

SOURCE Inter Press Service News Agency