As Chair of the Human Rights at Home Campaign (formerly the Campaign for a New Domestic Human Rights Agenda), I am part of a national effort to hold our government accountable for its domestic human rights record. This weekend I’ll be speaking at Amnesty International-U.S.A.’s annual general membership meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm thrilled to participate in a gathering of activists and artists brought together by a belief that human rights are universal. For both the meeting’s organizers and its participants, coming to New Orleans is a decision driven, in part, by its status as a city all-too-familiar with the casualties of cavalierly regarding the rights of some to be violable for no other reason than who they are, what they have, or where they live. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were neither the beginning nor the end of the human rights violations experienced by New Orleans residents. The storms merely shone a light on the conditions faced by a disproportionate number of poor and black New Orleanians intimately acquainted with what it means to have your rights violated. What better place than New Orleans to state, and thereby claim, the simple proposition found in the meeting’s title - "All Rights for All People"?
The most fundamental piece of the Campaign, and therefore the most important part of my job, is working with those who believe human rights issues must be a priority here. Joined by this fundamental belief, we can move forward to make real changes in the way we both define and discharge the human rights obligations our government has assumed on our behalf. Health care, environmental justice and sustainability, economic justice and equity (including housing and forced evictions)—these are all human rights issues; and should be regarded as such by legislators and policy makers that write the laws and enact the policies that can remedy these problems. Failure to act on these concerns now means that Americans across the country—from major metropolitan centers like New Orleans to small rural townships in the Midwest—continue to risk having their human rights violated with little hope of either any real remedy or someone being held to account.
To this end, the Human Rights at Home Campaign is working to establish an infrastructure to enforce, implement and monitor compliance with our human rights obligations. The cornerstones of this infrastructure, at the federal level, are an Inter-Agency Working Group on Human Rights and a Commission on Civil and Human Rights. To establish the Working Group, the Campaign calls on President Obama to issue an executive order that puts the power of the presidency behind a coordinated Executive Branch effort to better enforce and implement the rights and duties found in treaties such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. To transform the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights into a U.S. Commission on Civil and Human Rights, the Campaign calls on Congress to pass legislation to effectuate critical changes needed to expand the Commission’s mandate and to limit the political partisanship that has caused the Commission to lose its way. Anchored by these two institutions, this infrastructure would require high level government officials to operate within a human rights framework for the first time – something other countries have been doing for decades. This is the foundation of the type of effective human rights infrastructure we have a right to demand. Failure to institutionalize the current Administration’s articulated commitment to exemplary human rights leadership will thwart our ability to real and lasting progress in addressing the human rights violations of which the imagery of New Orleans in the wake of the storms remains a stark and haunting reminder.
Visit http://www.amnestyusa.org/... for more information about the conference this weekend.