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Bringing Human Rights Home
From: Columbia University
| By:
Catherine Powell |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The language of human rights can be a powerful tool for bringing attention to familiar US domestic problems such as poverty, prisoners' rights and discrimination. Catherine Powell (right), executive director of the Human Rights Institute at Columbia Law School, spoke to Fathom about the Institute's "Bringing Human Rights Home" program. |
Catherine Powell: "Bringing human rights home" is a shorthand way to say that the concept of human rights doesn't apply only to those people over there; it also applies to us, right here in our backyard. Our program is really an attempt to embrace that concept. |
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| Catherine Powell talks about the nature of human-rights issues in the States and worldwide. | |
We are trying to fill a niche where there is a lot of grassroots activism that uses the human-rights lens in the United States; but lawyers, I think, are really behind the curve, so we're trying to organize lawyers and train law students to be able to support grassroots activism by bringing human-rights help. We're especially trying to look at access to justice issues--for instance, in the criminal justice context, discrimination issues and also poverty--and we've been bringing lawyers together over the course of about a year to talk honestly about what we can do to support the activism and to really close this gap. |
The US government plays a leadership role in terms of trying to promote human rights overseas, but it doesn't really put that into practice at home. So we're also trying to work with the government to see how we can hold them accountable and also educate people within government about how international human-rights obligations apply at home as well as overseas. |
Fathom: Are they the same sorts of issues as abroad? |
Powell: I think some of them are essentially the same issues. We are a democracy, so we don't have widespread torture or some of the other gross human-rights violations that we see overseas. But there are problems in terms of access to justice for prisoners; Congress, for instance, just rolled back prisoner's rights with the Prison Reform Litigation Act. Obviously we have problems with police misconduct here in New York City and in other cities around the country. These are some of the issues that we see overseas also, happening right here in our backyard, and we can apply the same principles here at home. So even though we have domestic law protections like civil-rights legislation and so forth, human-rights law embraces a much broader concept. It speaks not only to civil rights but also economic rights. |
Fathom: Is "bringing human rights home" a term used outside of Columbia? |
Powell: It is a term that is beginning to be used fairly broadly. I think it really sprang from the idea of bringing Beijing home after the Beijing Women's Human Rights Conference, and all of us who went home wherever we were--whether Indonesia or Zimbabwe or the United States--talked about bringing Beijing home and bringing those principles home. So we're trying to move that energy over to not just Beijing for women's human rights, but human rights generally, to bring human rights home to the United States. |
WILD for Human Rights, which is Women's Institute for Leadership Development for Human Rights, has gotten the San Francisco City Council to adopt the Women's Human Rights Treaty (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women), and they're working with other cities and groups in other cities to try to get their local governments to embrace human-rights concepts at the local level. Since it's been very difficult to get the federal government and, specifically, Congress to ratify treaties, we're just going to bypass that and go the local level and sort of bring it to the people and hope that that can bubble up to a national movement. |
Fathom: What are the top five issues covered under "bringing human rights home"? |
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| Catherine Powell talks about using human rights as a language. | |
Powell: Well, I think criminal justice and poverty issues are definitely the top two. Within criminal justice, there are issues like the death penalty, disparities in drug sentencing, issues that women prisoners face, and police misconduct. That's four right there, and then poverty and the impact of welfare reform is another huge issue that embraces everything from food stamps to cash assistance to access to health care. I think those are the two broad areas where there is the most amount of activity on the human-rights front in the United States. |
Fathom: How do food stamps and welfare fit into human rights? |
Powell: It's very clear under human-rights law that people need to be supported to have a living wage as well as access to food and shelter. Where the new federal law, the Personal Responsibility Act, allows states and cities more discretion and encourages local government to move people from welfare to work, some local governments aren't necessarily supporting the movement from welfare to work and are just cutting people off with very little support in terms of childcare and other benefits. Even when somebody moves into work, it oftentimes is going to be a low-income job, where they can't afford health care and food. |
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| Catherine Powell talks about the relationship between food stamps, welfare and human rights. | |
In New York City, the city government has pretty much taken the approach of cutting people off with very little support. And in some cases they're doing this in ways that violate both human-rights law and federal law. For instance, one woman, Lou Garlick, who is a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit here in New York, went for food stamps and she was pregnant and was denied. Instead, she was told to go to a workfare program and that she had to make phone calls to get work and go through job search and job training before getting food. Meanwhile, this is a pregnant woman who needs access to food, and yes, she wants a job, but she also had a dire need for food. So this violates human rights (it also actually violates US federal law). But when we move from food to other kinds of benefits like cash assistance, where there isn't the same protection under US federal law, human rights provides a broader framework. |
Fathom: Why use the language of human rights when you already have civil-rights language in this country? |
Powell: I think using human rights as a language is much more powerful than using civil rights, because it speaks to a broader range of issues. It's not limited to the civil-rights paradigm. While Martin Luther King tried to talk about a poor people's movement and linked race and poverty, that idea seemed to really die with him. He also spoke in terms of a human-rights movement, but we haven't really continued that language. Now, with the new wave of activism, I think people are starting to use that language once again. It also links our issues with what's going on globally, which means we can benefit from the power of the international human-rights movement. We can get support from a human-rights activist in Latin America in just the same way we would support their issues, so I think that's what makes it powerful. It's both the people power of plugging into an international movement and using a paradigm that's broader than the domestic civil-rights paradigm. |
Fathom: Is what you see as the obliviousness to human rights at home a particularly American problem? |
Powell: Schoolchildren don't really learn about human rights in the United States the way they do in other countries. In South Africa, for instance, through street law, there is human-rights education. In other countries, people know about the language of human rights and they use the language of human rights, in some cases because those countries don't have democratic institutions, and so they reach for the international rather than for national civil-rights laws. But I think that's something that we need to change in this country, and we can do it through education in the schools. We're also exploring the use of popular culture to reach young people and we're making a "Human Rights Rocks" video that we hope to distribute through MTV and other media outlets to reach young people. |
Fathom: How do Americans think about having their issues described in the same language as overseas abuses are? |
Powell: Well, certainly if you talk to Jesse Helms, it's pretty repugnant, but the kind of reaction that, say, a Jesse Helms would have is the same kind of reaction you hear from China--"Don't meddle in our internal affairs." And how can we say that China or any other country should ratify treaties, should observe human rights and then not practice what we preach at home? |
Fathom: Why is there a resistance here? |
Powell: Well, I think not everyone understands what human rights is. Human rights exists out there in the international, but it also exists at home, it exists in our national fabric. It really exists in the US Constitution, but the broader concept of human rights isn't really embraced in our domestic framework. We have to try to make it less alien for people so they don't see it as this offshore body of law, or an offshore concept. It's something that is very much a part of our culture, but in a sort of limited way, so we have to figure out a way to bring that broader concept home. |
Fathom: How are you educating lawyers to "bring human rights home"? |
Powell: One way we're trying to train lawyers and law students is through bridging theory and practice. And we do this in a variety of programs. Just to give you a concrete example, in the human-rights clinic we're working on a case challenging the Dominican Republic for its expulsion of Haitians. This is a case where the Dominican Republic recently signed on to the Inter-American Court, so they've opened themselves up to outside scrutiny, which is a good thing. And so we've tried to say, well, one of the principles of the Inter-American system, just as it is for the global system, is nondiscrimination. You can't just put people on a truck and ship them back to Haiti without actually giving them due process, and without screening them to see if they have a right to be in the Dominican Republic. |
In many cases, the folks who are being shipped back are Dominican citizens of Haitian descent. They have a right to be there; they're citizens of the Dominican Republic. My students last semester went down to the Dominican Republic and talked with Haitians who have been kicked out and returned. They also went to Haiti to talk with Haitians on that side of the border. We developed a complaint that we filed in the Inter-American Court and then we argued that over the summer. That's an example of a concrete project where we're trying to bridge theory and practice, to teach students both about the theory of law and the practice of law. |
Fathom: What's a case within the United States where human-rights language is being brought to bear on a particular domestic issue? |
Powell: I think an example of that is our work on behalf of Kensington Welfare Rights Union, which is a welfare rights organization in Philadelphia that has worked nationally to build a poor people's movement using the language of human rights. They went on a Freedom Bus Tour two years ago where they visited poor people's groups all over the country to collect evidence about welfare reform and how it violates basic human rights--the right to food, the right to housing, the right to shelter and clothing. They ended up at the UN and presented this evidence and spoke with UN officials. |
Now, the fact that the United States hasn't ratified the economic rights covenant is a little bit of a problem, but it's still a framework that really energizes people, and Kensington is now playing a leading role in helping to develop this as an advocacy tool. They have also filed a complaint in the Inter-American system that my students are now working on, so that it's a way of bridging legal advocacy with other forms of activism. |
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