TH E FO R D FO U N DATI O N

The Ford Foundation320 East 43rd StreetNew York, NY 10017www.fordfound.org

2004

CASE STUDIES OF HUMAN RIGHTS WORK IN THE UNITED STATES

Close to Home

For many Americans, human rights work is something that happensbeyond the borders of the United States. A growing number of U.S. organizations, however, are finding great power in using this setof universal standards—and traditional human rights tools such asfact-finding, litigation, organizing and advocacy—to advance theirefforts to abolish the death penalty, end discrimination, promoteworkers’ rights and eliminate poverty. Close to Home presents 13 casestudies of human rights work that is making life better for people inthe United States. Activists, funders and policy makers will find in thisvolume new points of view and valuable tools for seeking positivesocial change in their communities and in the world.

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CASE STUDIES OF HUMAN RIGHTS WORK IN THE UNITED STATES

Close to Home

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The Ford Foundation is an independent, nonprofit grant-making organization. For more than half a century it has been a resource for innovative peopleand institutions worldwide, guided by its goals ofstrengthening democratic values, reducing povertyand injustice, promoting international cooperation,and advancing human achievement. With headquar-ters in New York, the foundation has offices in Africa,the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Russia.

The Ford Foundation320 East 43rd StreetNew York, NY 10017www.fordfound.org

Copyright ©2004 by the Ford Foundation

Reprinted June 2004

A PUBLICATION OF THE FORD FOUNDATION

CASE STUDIES OF HUMAN RIGHTS WORK IN THE UNITED STATES

Close to Home

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Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home.

Eleanor Roosevelt

I think it is necessary to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study would not have been possible without theinspiration and input of the activists and organiza-tions that participated in it. These include: CathyAlbisa, Wyndi Anderson, Gillian Andrews, WillieBaptist, Ajamu Baraka, Ellen Barry, members of theBorder Network for Human Rights, Larry Bressler,Widney Brown, Dr. Robert Bullard, Linda Burnham,Youmna Chlala, Leslie Calman, Arturo Carrillo, ChrisCaruso, Viola Casares, Patti Chang, Jung Hee Choi,Radhika Coomaraswamy, Robert T. Coulter, Roz Cuomo,Carrie Cuthbert, Suha Dabbauseh, Mary & CarrieDann, Shelia Dauer, Krishanti Dharmaraj, LaToya Davis,Monica Ghosh Driggers, Roland Emerson, DawnFaucher, Julie Fishel, Fernando Garcia, members of theGeorgia Citizens’ Coalition on Hunger, Rick Halperin,Monique Harden, Steve Hawkins, Pam Hester, JaribuHill, Cheri Honkala, Lisa Howley, Andy Huff, MariaJimenez, Bill Kuhel, Deborah LaBelle, Ann Lehman,Ethel Long-Scott, Miriam Ching Louie, Alma Maquitico,Gay McDougall, Cynthia Mesh, Miguel Miranda,Martina Morales, 2002 New Freedom Bus Tour Ridersand local hosts, Tina Nieves, Organization for BlackStruggle, Ramona Ortega, Teresa Park, Carolyn Pittman,Catherine Powell, Project South, Janice Raines, SpeedyRice, Margie Richards, Sandra Robertson, RebeccaRolfe, Maria De La Rosa, Loretta Ross, Dale Rundell,Malika Saada Saar, Deborah Schaaf, Chris Sewall, KimSlote, Andrea Smith, Brenda Smith, Damu Smith,Cindy Soohoo, Elizabeth Sullivan, Peg Tiberio, AkibaTimoya, Steve Tullberg, Galen and Terriny Tyler,Dionne Vann, Penny Venetis, Natalie Walker, HeatherWest, Sarah White, Sherry Wilson, Dr. Beverly Wright,and Tameka Wynn.

The introduction was written by Larry Cox, SeniorProgram Officer in the Human Rights Unit, and

Dorothy Q. Thomas, a senior consultant to the unitwho also authored the case studies on the Border Network for Human Rights and on custodial sexualabuse of women in U.S. prisons. Heidi Dorow, ahuman rights consultant, wrote the studies of theBringing Human Rights Home Lawyers’ Network, theU.S. Project of the Center for Economic and SocialRights, the Indian Law Resource Center, the Missis-sippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights, the NationalCoalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and theWomen’s Rights Network. Phoebe Eng, a foundationconsultant and director of The Social ChangeCommunications Project, authored the case studieson environmental justice, the Kensington WelfareRights Union, and the National Center for HumanRights Education. Robin Levi, the human rights direc-tor at Justice Now, authored the studies on WILD forHuman Rights and the Women of Color ResourceCenter and assisted in the research for the study onwomen in prison.

Close to Home was edited by Larry Cox andDorothy Q. Thomas, with invaluable and indefatiga-ble assistance from James Bornemeier. Additional edi-torial oversight was provided by Elizabeth Coleman,Taryn Higashi, Thea Lurie and Alex Wilde of the FordFoundation. It was copy edited by Anita Bushell. Photoand design support was provided by Dayna Bealy andLaura Walworth of the Ford Foundation. As always,nothing would ever be possible without the patienceand attention to detail of Mary DeCaro and MaryLopez of the Ford Foundation. Special thanks are dueto Natalia Kanem, Deputy to the Vice President, Peaceand Social Justice Program, whose vision and supportmade this project possible.

The study was designed by Susan Huyser.

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CONTENTS

4 Acknowledgements6 Introduction: A turning point in U.S. social justice advocacy

Part I Domestic and International Litigation

20 Death penalty: The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty26 Economic rights: The Center for Economic and Social Rights 32 Indigenous rights: The Indian Law Resource Center38 Building legal capacity: Bringing Human Rights Home Lawyers’ Network

Part II Education, Organizing and Documentation

44 Human rights education: The National Center for Human Rights Education50 Human rights organizing: The Kensington Welfare Rights Union58 Human rights documentation: The Women’s Rights Network64 Building community capacity: The Border Network for Human Rights

Part III Multidimensional Advocacy

72 Gender and race discrimination: WILD for Human Rights78 Civil and economic rights: The Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights86 Local and global advocacy: The Women of Color Resource Center

Part IV A Total Social Change Model: Two Thematic Case Studies

92 Environmental justice98 Sexual abuse of women in prison

Appendix

104 Contact information105 Glossary

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6 CLOSE TO HOME

Human rights are international ethical standards,approved by the member states of the United Nations,codified into law and imposing specific obligations onall governments including the United States. Writtenby an international team led by Eleanor Rooseveltshortly after World War II, these rights address themost immediate and basic needs of all human beingsand demand the transformation of every society. Noless than with other countries, examining the UnitedStates through the lens of human rights illuminatespersistent inequities in U.S. society and offers an alter-native view of how it can and should be changed. Themovement for human rights in the United States pro-motes this alternative vision. It seeks a revolution ofvalues in the United States that places the affirmationof human dignity and equality at the center of domes-tic and foreign policy and counters unilateral tenden-cies with multilateral commitments, shared withother countries, to promote social and economic jus-tice on a global scale.

It is primarily out of recognition of the power ofhuman rights to challenge and change domestic poli-cies and practices that the United States government,while championing human rights abroad, for manyyears and through all administrations, has resisted theapplication of human rights at home. It is out of thesame recognition of this transformative power ofhuman rights that a growing number of U.S. organiza-tions and activists are using human rights to informand even to infuse their work for social justice. Thepresent volume is a snapshot of this emerging U.S.human rights movement.

It is a movement that has been growing for some

INTRODUCTION

time but whose impact is only just now beginning tobe felt. The American Civil Liberties Union, one of theoldest and largest U.S. rights organizations, held amajor conference in October 2003 on the use of inter-national law in U.S. courts. In June 2003, the SupremeCourt of the United States cited the human rightstreaty on racial discrimination in upholding affirma-tive action and, citing a 1981 decision of the EuropeanCourt of Human Rights, a few days later overturned aTexas sodomy statute. That same month the first ever-national network on human rights in the UnitedStates, conceived at a July 2002 conference at HowardUniversity Law School, was launched by more than 50organizations that use a wide range of methods andcover many issues.

What is happening here? Why are an increasingnumber of U.S. activists, like those discussed in thisvolume, seeing their work through a prism of humanrights? Why is the country’s highest court increasing-ly open to consideration of human rights law? Whathas led the Ford Foundation, the JEHT Foundation,the Atlantic Philanthropies, the Otto Bremer Founda-tion, the Shaler Adams Foundation, The CaliforniaWomen’s Foundation and a number of other national,family and community foundations to develop ahuman rights dimension to their U.S. grant making?

Why human rights in the United States?A changing domestic environment: Obviously no sin-

gle factor can explain these changes. But activists andothers consulted for this study identify one underlyingconstant: progressive developments in social-justicethinking and advocacy in this country. Across the

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INTRODUCTION 7

American Indian, civil, women’s, worker, gay, immi-grant and prisoner rights communities in the UnitedStates, a powerful new politics of social justice isemerging—one that favors multi- over single-issuework; that understands discrimination in terms ofcompound rather than singular identities; that con-ceives of rights holistically rather than in terms of out-moded hierarchies; and, finally, that situates thosemost affected at the center of advocacy.

This approach is visible, for example, in the grow-ing number of multi-issue, cross-constituency networksin the United States, including the National Campaignto Restore Civil Rights, the sentencing reform move-ment and living wage campaigns. These efforts have incommon a focus on educating and organizing themost affected communities across identities, connect-ing them with allies in the policy, legal and donor com-munities and balancing the need for short-term gainswith a commitment to long-term movement building.Such multi-dimensional work has made for increas-ingly layered advocacy strategies that simultaneouslyinvolve education, organizing, policy, legal and schol-arly work at both the local and national level. Sophis-ticated communications efforts, close attention toelectoral politics and collaborative donor support con-sistently play a part.

The movement for human rights in the UnitedStates is not the cause of these transformations in U.S.social justice work. It is emerging out of them. “Thereis simply no better way to broaden the influence andeffectiveness of all our struggles for social justice thanthrough human rights,” said Loretta Ross, a pioneeringcivil rights, women’s rights and now U.S. human rightsactivist who directs the National Center for HumanRights Education, profiled in part two of this volume.Her compatriots in this study, and a growing numberof activists not discussed here, agree. The humanrights vision, its legal framework, methods and strate-gies not only readily accommodate these new forms ofU.S. social justice activism, but also offer powerfulmeans for their consolidation and expression.

Engagement with the larger world: The emergenceof a U.S. human rights movement also reflects dra-matic developments outside the United States. Indeed,

the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001 shatteredprobably forever the neat separation of foreign fromdomestic concerns. For the first time since the coldwar, the United States is engaged in a vast public con-versation about its role in the world and the implica-tions of that role both abroad and at home. As indicat-ed by a 2002 Chicago Council on Foreign Relationsreport, Americans are concerned now more than everabout the attitudes of the world towards the UnitedStates. This hard-earned global consciousness hasspawned a growing domestic interest in multilateral-ism, and in the international legal and political sys-tem, no more so than in the constituencies that con-cern themselves with the defense of fundamentalrights. “Our struggle never has been a purely localstruggle,” said worker and human rights activistJaribu Hill, who co-founded The Mississippi Worker’sCenter for Human Rights discussed in part three. “It’sjust that we can no longer afford to disregard the glob-al link. What ever happens ‘over there’ has implica-tions here.”

As U.S. activists try to make that global linkthrough the use of human rights in their domesticwork, however, they confront the continuing effect ofwhat has been termed U.S. “exceptionalism” and howthis attitude became intertwined with the politics ofthe cold war. At the close of World War II, the UnitedStates, at the urging of key civic, religious and civilrights groups, played a leadership role in the creationof the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.Yet from the beginning, powerful conservatives inboth parties were aware that these new human rightsstandards could be used by other countries to high-light the shame of racial apartheid at home. The U.S.worked diligently to deny U.N. enforcement powers tohuman rights bodies and pointedly refused to ratifyhuman rights treaties.

As professor Carol Anderson details in her newbook, Eyes Off the Prize: African-Americans and theStruggle for Human Rights 1948-1954, organizations athome, like the NAACP and the National Negro Con-gress, and domestic leaders like W.E.B. Dubois andWilliam Patterson, who sought to use the new inter-national mechanisms to halt lynching and segrega-

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8 CLOSE TO HOME

tion, were fiercely attacked by U.S. officials and influ-ential media voices as un-American if not commu-nist. Similar attacks were later made on Malcolm Xand The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. whenthey too made connections between racial oppres-sion in the United States and international humanrights. The poisonous effect of these attempts toequate internationalism with subversion or treasonlingers to this day.

This brand of cold war politics sought not only todiscourage U.S. activists from invoking human rightsin their domestic work, but also to distort the verymeaning of human rights for Americans by eliminat-ing its economic and social dimensions. Influenced by,among others, the emphasis of Franklin and EleanorRoosevelt on economic rights, as discussed by CassSunstein in his forthcoming book The Second Bill ofRights: The Last Great Speech of Franklin Delano Rooseveltand America’s Unfinished Pursuit of Freedom, the Univer-sal Declaration of Human Rights treats civil and polit-ical rights as equal to the rights to food, housing, edu-cation, and social security. Aware that in addition to itsracial practices, the United States was also vulnerableto criticism of its economic and social inequality, aseries of administrations have claimed that overcom-ing these problems involves aspirations not rights. Tothe detriment of myriad fights for social justice in theUnited States this strategy has proved surprisinglyeffective. “We have swallowed the U.S. position thateconomic, social and cultural rights don’t exist,” GayMcDougall, the executive director of the InternationalHuman Rights Law Group whose work is discussed inpart four, told us. “And U.S. advocates have, in theirinaction in this area, implicitly acquiesced to the gov-ernment position.”

The development of a U.S. human rights move-ment is driven in part by the desire to reclaim the fulllegacy and meaning of international human rights. Itis also driven, perhaps more than anything else, by thepotential of human rights to restore to U.S. social jus-tice work a sense of the underlying commonality ofsimply being human that is often lost to all of its divi-sions by identity, geography, issue area and belief. AsCheri Honkala, an economic human rights activist

who heads the Kensington Welfare Rights Union dis-cussed in part two, put it, “we base our vision in theessence of being human.”

These three factors—the dynamic changes occur-ring in U.S. social justice activism, the increased aware-ness of the importance of U.S. multilateralism and therelevance of the international legal and political sys-tem to domestic as well as foreign rights policy and aninstinctive desire to reassert the common, humandimension of all social justice work—have con-tributed to the beginning of a potentially transforma-tive human rights movement in the United States.What remains at issue is how this movement canstrengthen U.S. social justice work that is itself increas-ingly global in character, indivisible in approach,diverse in constituency and righteous in process aswell as effect.

Why these case studies?Readers of this volume may wonder exactly where

this U.S. human rights movement can be found. Muchto our surprise it seems to be cropping up in differentareas all across the United States simultaneously, a factthat made the selection of the 13 cases studies in thisvolume extremely challenging. To arrive at a manage-able sample, we decided to focus only on completedadvocacy projects, carried out explicitly in humanrights terms, which would lend themselves to anassessment of the pros and cons of this approach. Eventhese fairly restrictive criteria, however, left us withtoo many candidates. We further decided to focus onlyon those groups who are or have been funded by theFord Foundation and to do so with attention to diver-sity of issues, method of work and geographic location.

The studies that were ultimately chosen focus onthe death penalty, race and gender discrimination, andeconomic, environmental, immigrant, indigenous,prisoner and worker rights in California, Georgia,Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Mon-tana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Washington, D.C. andWest Virginia. They are grouped by method of work:part one discusses domestic and international litiga-tion; part two focuses on education, organizing andfact-finding; part three looks at multi-issue, cross-con-

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INTRODUCTION 9

stituency and transnational advocacy; and part fourexamines two thematic cases (environmental justiceand sexual abuse of women in prison) that involve allof the above.

The purpose of this project is not to capture theU.S. human rights movement as a whole but to pro-vide a picture of some leading organizations at an ini-tial stage of its—and sometimes their—development.It was prompted by our realization that this work islargely invisible in the United States and virtuallyunknown to the rest of the world. The approach isexploratory: We aim to portray a wide range of U.S.human rights work and to discuss its effect along acontinuum from the legal accountability of the gov-ernment of the United States to the empowerment oflocal communities. Ultimately, our hope is to provokeinformed debate about human rights work in the Unit-ed States and to generate much-needed moral, politi-cal, institutional and financial support for this work ata crucial turning point in U.S. history with respect tothe protection and promotion of fundamental rights.

What is the value of using human rights?The shift to employing human rights in social jus-

tice work in the United States means different thingsto different groups. For some, its use is largely instru-mental, helpful in limited contexts for a specific pur-pose. For others, its value is more fundamental, engen-dering a profound rethinking of their work fromwhich, as one activist put it, “there is no turning back.”Most practitioners fall somewhere in between thesetwo positions. As a whole, their work suggests several

common benefits to the use of human rights in U.S.social justice work in terms of a) vision, b) legal frame-work, c) method and d) strategy.

A. Broad vision: By all accounts, the single great-est value of employing human rights in U.S. social jus-tice work is its vision of rights as intrinsic to the statusof being human. Indeed, human rights are the expres-sion of what is required to be fully human. Theserights are not dependent on recognition by an externalauthority. They are not a reward for certain behaviorsor for enjoying a certain status such as citizen or prop-erty owner or white person. They belong to all humanbeings equally. This is similar to the assertion of amore limited set of “certain inalienable rights” thatinformed the U.S. Declaration of Independence andBill of Rights. This principle has been a battlegroundthroughout U.S. history. At times, particularly whenthere is a perception of an internal or external threat tonational security, the scope and meaning of inalien-able rights come under assault. Increasingly, and dan-gerously, rights are seen as a gift granted by the state(and able to be revoked by the state) and even, in someinstances, as something the state itself can assert. Thisprepares the way for their erosion or loss.

Human rights assert the inalienability of rights ina much broader sense than has ever been expressedconstitutionally. The preamble to the Universal Decla-ration of Human Rights says that “recognition of theinherent dignity and of the equal and inalienablerights of all members of the human family is the foun-dation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Thesimple use of the term human rights instead of

Reframing one’s work in human rights termstakes you back to the primacy of equalityand dignity no matter what the circumstance.Once you reassert that basic principle, peoples’ perceptions of the problem changeand new avenues for advocacy open up.”

“

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10 CLOSE TO HOME

women’s or worker’s or prisoner’s or immigrant’srights, for example, elicits an understanding of rightsas inherently the same for all people rather than asdefined by this or that particular status.

To some, this may all seem like little more thansemantics. But, as Human Rights Watch’s WidneyBrown put it for virtually all the activists in this study,reframing one’s work in human rights terms “takesyou back to the primacy of equality and dignity nomatter what the circumstance. Once you reassert thatbasic principle, peoples’ perceptions of the problemchange and new avenues for advocacy open up.”

B. Expansive legal framework: One of these“new avenues” is clearly the legal arena. For many U.S.activists, who work in a constitutional framework anddepend on domestic statute, the idea of an alternative,inalienable, universal source of legal rights is somethingof a revelation. It is one that, given the longstandingdetermination of the United States government toshield itself from any meaningful internationalhuman rights obligations, is usually met with anunderstandable skepticism. “I was looking for imme-diate relief for my clients,” said Brenda Smith, a pris-oner rights activist and law professor at American Uni-versity whose work is featured in part four. “I wasn’tsure what kind of impact human rights would have.”

Yet, as the case studies of domestic and interna-tional litigation in part one suggest, U.S. legal expertsare increasingly converting their initial skepticismabout human rights into a growing appreciation of itsuse, as environmental justice attorney Monique Hard-en put it, “to break out of the chokehold of domesticlaw.” The context for this conversion is remarkablysimilar across issue areas: the growing conservatism ofthe federal and state bench, diminishing meaningfulremedies for grievous abuse and, especially after Sep-tember 11th, the attack on established civil rights andliberties, including due process, access to counsel,equal protection and freedom of information, all ofwhich limit or block the use of purely domestic reme-dies to rights violations. “I was as skeptical as the nextperson about the relevance of human rights to domes-tic legal advocacy,” Anthony Romero, the executivedirector of the American Civil Liberties Union, told a

group of human rights funders in July 2003. “But in thelast five years or so I’ve undergone a conversion, par-ticularly post 9/11. Human rights give us another placeto go.”

Interpretive authority: That “other place”involves interpretive and binding uses of humanrights law, which often offers stronger protectionsthan U.S. law, in both U.S. and international courts.The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty,for example, uses a combination of grassroots organiz-ing and legal advocacy to frame the death penalty inthe United States as a violation of human rights. Bydoing so it aims to introduce a global analysis of evolv-ing standards of decency with respect to the deathpenalty into the consciousness of the U.S. judiciary. Asa result of its efforts, and those of countless other anti-death penalty activists, attorneys and scholars, theSupreme Court ruled in 2002 that the execution ofpeople who are mentally retarded violates the EighthAmendment. Justice Steven’s majority opinion notedthat “within the world community the imposition ofthe death penalty for crimes committed by mentallyretarded offenders is overwhelmingly disapproved.”Steve Hawkins, the national coalition’s former execu-tive director, told us that the coalition now aims to“drive home the point” that the United States is “out ofstep with the world” even further, with a particularfocus on the execution of juvenile offenders, whichthe United States alone now admittedly practices.

Binding law: In other cases, human rights lawwith its greater protections is used in a more bindingand less interpretive manner. In the case involvingcustodial sexual misconduct discussed in part four, forexample, Michigan attorney Deborah LaBelle and oth-ers used U.N. standards governing the treatment ofprisoners to obtain a settlement that prohibited cross-gender guarding in intimate custodial settings. Thissettlement later ran afoul of domestic equal employ-ment law, but nonetheless resulted in much greaterattention to the obvious risk of allowing male officersto work in contact positions in U.S. women’s prisons.“This is how progressive law is made,” LaBelle said.“You introduce new ideas as often as is appropriateuntil they become commonplace.”

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INTRODUCTION 11

At times, when all avenues of domestic relief havebeen exhausted, such binding human rights decisionsare pursued in regional or international bodies. TheCenter for Economic and Social Rights, for example, isinvolved in an ongoing collaborative effort to arguebefore the Inter-American Commission on HumanRights that U.S. welfare legislation violates economichuman rights. Even if any decision by the commissiongoes unenforced, the center believes that a successfuloutcome in this case will dramatically highlight theinadequacy of U.S. legal protections of the rights ofpoor people, adding to the mounting domestic pres-sure to improve those protections. This work is of par-ticular importance because most Americans are notonly unaware of the deficiencies of the United Statesin ensuring economic rights but even that such rightsexist. “We are trying to get people to think of econom-ic inequality differently, in terms of rights,” said CathyAlbisa, the director of the center’s U.S. program. “Iwant people to see that you cannot reduce rights. Youeither have to hold the line or increase them.”

It is perhaps not surprising that the legal effects ofhuman rights are expressed very gradually in domesticjurisprudence and sometimes, despite a resoundinglegal victory as in the case of indigenous rights dis-cussed in part one, not without a lot of surroundingadvocacy by the affected community. In that case, theIndian Law Resource Center lodged a successful com-plaint before the Inter-American Commission onHuman Rights, charging the United States with themisappropriation of the Western Shoshone Dann fam-ily’s ancestral lands. The commission found in January2003 that the United States had “failed to ensure theDann’s right to property under conditions of equality.”The United States responded that it “rejects the com-mission’s report in its entirety and does not intend tocomply with the commission’s recommendations.”The resource center is now spearheading a campaign toprotest the U.S. government’s disregard for the rule oflaw. As center attorney Deborah Schaaf sees it, “Weevolve. Laws evolve. Domestic law is not impenetrable.Things will change.”

Given the difficulties of litigating human rights inthe United States, the legal practitioners featured in

this volume see the need to develop a multifacetedstrategy for this work involving both short-term litiga-tion in specific issue areas and long-term change inlegal culture. One of the main vehicles for this work isthe Bringing Human Rights Home Lawyers’ Networkat Columbia University Law School. The program’sdirector, Cindy Soohoo, seeks to build the humanrights capacity of U.S. attorneys and to expose up-and-coming legal practitioners to this approach. In aimingto launch a new era of human rights lawyering in theUnited States, the program mirrors the views ofSupreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who said in aninterview with the New York Times on July 6, 2003,“whether our Constitution...fits into the governingdocuments of other nations, I think will be a challengefor the next generations.”

C. Participatory methods of education, organ-izing and fact-finding: While the legal communitytakes a fairly gradual stance toward incorporatinghuman rights values, community-based educators,organizers and fact-finders take a more immediateapproach. Virtually all of the organizations featured inpart two, which addresses education, organizing andfact-finding, found in human rights an affirmation ofhuman dignity and equality that resonated powerfullywith the often impoverished, abused and virtually dec-imated communities in which many of them work. “Aswelfare reform kicked in, we were concerned that poorpeople would turn against each other over the crumbsthat trickle down,” Ethel Long Scott of the Women’sEconomic Agenda Project says. “…The Universal Decla-ration [of Human Rights] allowed for a common visionof opportunity and well-being for all people.”

For many of the most affected U.S. communities,this common vision of opportunity and well-being forall can be revolutionary, but only if they know it exists.“To have a human rights movement,” Loretta Ross,founder of the National Center for Human Rights Edu-cation, told us, “people first have to know what theirhuman rights are.” With this in mind, the center aimsto reach out to different communities across the Unit-ed States and work with them to know and defendtheir human rights. Since 1996, it has trained animpressive list of U.S social justice advocates and com-

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munity leaders in the principles and practices ofhuman rights, using a variety of different methods. ForRoss, whatever the specific achievements of this work,the overarching aim of human rights education is tobuild the political will of those most affected to deter-mine their future for themselves.

The sense of empowerment that comes with theuse of human rights is a crucial tool for community-based organizers, as is evident in the work of the Kens-ington Welfare Rights Union and the Poor People’sEconomic Human Rights Campaign. Started in theearly 1990s in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kens-ington, which has the highest concentration of pover-ty in Pennsylvania, the union uses a combination ofhuman rights education and organizing to mobilizepoor people on their own behalf. What began as a localeffort is now rapidly spreading among poor communi-ties across the nation and even internationally. In thepast five years, the participation of local anti-povertyactivists in the poor people’s campaign has grownfrom a handful of initial organizations to a member-ship of over 60 groups. More than one observer attrib-utes the campaign’s success in recruiting to “the visionand hope that the new approach of human rights hasgiven them.”

This is not to suggest that one can take the partic-ipatory principles and practice of human rights onfaith. Just because a group calls its work “human rightswork” does not mean it will inevitably or even desir-ably adopt a participatory approach. In fact, manyhuman rights organizations have carried out crucialhuman rights work in the United States without uti-lizing such participatory methods. In the area ofhuman rights fact-finding, for example, human rightsorganizations like Amnesty International and HumanRights Watch, whose work is discussed in part four,have published invaluable reports on domestic abusewith very little active or sustained participation of thecommunities most affected. Nonetheless, as commu-nity-based human rights work in the United States hasincreased, fact-finding methods themselves havebegun to change. This is reflected in Amnesty Interna-tional’s willingness, as discussed by Sheila Dauer, thegroup’s U.S. gender expert, to allow its membership to

work on the countries in which they live (includingthe United States). It is also reflected in the leadershipof affected individuals and communities themselvesin documenting the abuses they suffer.

The work of The Women’s Rights Network dis-cussed in part two exemplifies this latter trend. Thenetwork involved survivors of domestic violence indocumenting and analyzing their own experiences inhuman rights terms, an approach that led to theiractive participation in the subsequent advocacy effortand their formation of local support groups to high-light the role of domestic violence in child custody dis-putes. “We saw participation as a human right in andof itself,” said Carrie Cuthbert, the network’s co-founder.

As the previous paragraph suggests, human rightshave the potential to alter the usual dynamics of socialchange work in this country, in which the “affected”and their advocates can become somewhat estranged.As poor people, workers, immigrants, women, gays,prisoners and others become aware of their humanrights and organize to defend them, they graduallybecome the agents rather than the objects of socialchange. This begins to alter the power balance betweenthose who experience human rights abuse and thosewho act on their behalf, moving them from aclient/professional relationship toward a more equalpartnership. To some observers this may seem like asubtle shift. But its value in terms of sustaining long-term, community-based advocacy for social changemay be far-reaching.

This is perhaps best exemplified by the work ofThe Border Network for Human Rights, which organ-izes local human rights committees in immigrantcommunities across the U.S. Mexico border, a heavilymilitarized area. The network has had an effect in theshort term on the enforcement practices of the BorderPatrol, regional legalization efforts and the nationaldialogue about immigration policy. But its most signif-icant achievement may be its use of participatoryhuman rights education, organizing and fact-findingmethods to build the capacity of immigrant communi-ties to know and defend their rights, even in the face of considerable government hostility. “Everything de-

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INTRODUCTION 13

pends on our commitment to internal democracy, toleadership by the community,” said Fernando Garcia,network executive director. “It’s the only way toensure lasting social change.”

D. Multidimensional advocacy strategies: Ashuman rights help to transform U.S. social justicemethods, they also support the emergence of new,multidimensional advocacy strategies. Part three dis-cusses the use of such strategies by three groups whoseadvocacy transcends the familiar boundaries of identi-ty, issue and country. This creative work touches onsome of the most entrenched divisions in U.S. socialjustice advocacy and in American society itself. Itsshort-term effects, although difficult to measure at thisearly date, are encouraging. How exactly to build onthose effects, especially given the intense organiza-tional pressures sparked by the global economicdownturn is, as one activist put it, “an on-going con-versation,” and an exhilarating one.

In pursuit of cross-identity advocacy work, forexample, the Women’s Institute for Leadership Devel-opment for Human Rights used human rights to take amore integrated approach to the elimination of genderand race discrimination in the city of San Francisco.The institute found, that absent a human rights frame-work, the city’s anti-discrimination policy was toocompartmentalized and reactive to effectively protectwomen and girls, particularly those of color, from biasand abuse. The institute’s co-founder, Krishanti Dhar-maraj, worked with both government officials andgrassroots activists to adopt a local ordinance thatreframed the city’s anti-discrimination work in more

integrated and proactive terms using as a legal basisthe human rights conventions on the elimination ofsex and race discrimination. For Dharmaraj, the cam-paign’s process was as important as its outcome. Shefelt that the use of human rights enabled anti-discrim-ination activists, who were otherwise segregated byidentity and issue area, to come together under a com-mon framework, focus their efforts and secure policymore responsive to the double burden of gender andrace discrimination in the lives of women and girls.

The search for a similar link, in this case betweencivil and economic rights, led Jaribu Hill to found theMississippi Workers Center for Human Rights. Hill, aveteran of both the civil and workers’ rights move-ments, saw in human rights a way to link the disparateand at times even antagonistic strands of civil rightsand economic justice. Through the center’s own litiga-tion and training programs, and its co-sponsorship ofthe Southern Human Rights Organizers’ Conferencesand Network, Hill works with a wide range of regionalsocial justice activists to strengthen and coordinatetheir civil and economic rights work. In her view, tothink of civil and economic rights as separate is simplyno longer responsive to the experience of poor peopleof color in the South, in the country or in the world asa whole. By putting them together, Hill says, “humanrights lead to more systematic change.”

For that change to be truly systematic, it will haveto be global, an insight fundamental to the work ofThe Women of Color Resource Center, along with thatof virtually all the activists featured in this volume.The Oakland, Calif.-based center was co-founded by

“Everything depends on our commitment to internal democracy, to leadership by the community. It’s the only way to ensure lasting social change.”

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Linda Burnham and Miriam Ching Louie, who firstmet at the 1985 U.N. World Conference on Women inNairobi, Kenya. The two activists set out to use subse-quent world conferences on women and race to intro-duce local women of color to their international coun-terparts and to use human rights to bring that globalconsciousness home. “Human rights provides thatbaseline context where you and everyone else in theworld has the same starting place,” said Burnham.“There isn’t anything else in the world with which youcan say that.”

One could argue that the participatory methodsand multidimensional strategies of social change dis-cussed above is by no means unique to human rights.This is true. For most of the activists discussed in thisstudy, the value of human rights is not to create pro-gressive trends in U.S. rights advocacy but to providethose trends with an underlying philosophy of rights,a resonant legal framework and even a methodologi-cal discipline that is not otherwise available domesti-cally. “There was simply no body of U.S. laws thateither described or provided adequate remedy for themultiple, synergistic and cumulative impacts of envi-ronmental degradation in a person’s whole life experi-ence,” said Monique Harden, whose work is discussedin part four. “Human rights allowed us to get where wewanted to go faster.”

Faster, however, does not always mean easier. Forthe educators, organizers, fact-finders, policy advo-cates and even litigators discussed above, the adoptionof a participatory, multi-dimensional human rightsapproach to their work proved extremely challenging.For this reason, they and many others like them cametogether at Howard University Law School in July2002 and agreed to found the first-ever national net-work on human rights in the United States. The net-work’s primary purpose is reflected in its first publica-tion, Something Inside So Strong: A Resource Guide onHuman Rights in the United States, which provides con-crete models and case studies of successful U.S. humanrights work. It has given itself a comprehensive mis-sion: to increase the visibility of U.S. human rightswork and build the capacity of domestic social justiceadvocates to know their human rights, organize on

their behalf, document violations, engage policy mak-ers, litigate cases and produce scholarship, all thewhile using a participatory and multi-dimensionalapproach with a clear global connection.

Do human rights provide a model forsocial change work in the United States?Readers of this volume will no doubt decide for

themselves if human rights offer an effective modelfor social change in the United States. But when all thedimensions of a human rights approach—vision,framework, method and strategy—come together inone focused effort, they produce an immensely power-ful effect. In the environmental justice and women-in-prison cases discussed in part four, for example, practi-tioners, although initially quite skeptical, began byexploring the conceptual relevance of human rights totheir work, educating not only themselves but alsoaffected constituents about their human rights. Theyalso collaborated more closely with their domestic col-leagues working at different levels, conferred withcounterparts overseas, connected to internationalhuman rights organizations and the United Nations,and used both domestic and international legal mech-anisms. Their cumulative efforts had the respectiveeffects of a) securing compensation and relocation foran environmentally devastated community, and b)transforming both the federal and state level responseto sexual misconduct in prisons in this country. Kris-hanti Dharmaraj put it most succinctly, “I don’t knowhow to do social change in this complex world but todo human rights.”

One of the unexpected benefits of employinghuman rights as a model for social change is increasedattention paid by the domestic and international printand broadcast media. The human rights work on envi-ronmental justice and custodial sexual violence, forexample, attracted unprecedented media attention tothose issues at the local, state, national and even inter-national level. What one activist called the “drum-beat” of media attention not only shed light on an oth-erwise underreported issue, but also put pressure onresponsible policy makers to resolve it. This volume isreplete with such examples.

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INTRODUCTION 15

What are the challenges to U.S. human rights work? Not a single activist, organization, network,

observer or donor involved with this project sees thefurther development of a movement for human rightsin the United States as a magic bullet. The challengefacing human rights work in the United States differsfor different organizations, but existing and emergentU.S. human rights groups face several key obstacles incommon: a) tenacious U.S. government resistance toapplying human rights law domestically, b) real diffi-culties for lawyers and social justice activists indomestic application, and, finally, c) the allure of whatLangston Hughes once called “the false patrioticwreath.”

A. U.S. exceptionalism and the persistence ofstructural racism: One could argue that the trenchantresistance of the United States government to anyform of meaningful human rights obligation reflects,in large part, the persistence of structural racism inthis country. There is abundant evidence of this con-nection. In a revealing exchange with Justice RuthBader Ginsberg in the Supreme Court on April 1, 2003,for example, the Solicitor General of the United Statesobjected explicitly to the relevance of the affirmativeaction practices of other countries to those in our own.In a similar vein, the U.S. delegation’s departure fromthe 2001 U. N. World Conference Against Racism, whileportrayed as solely a protest of anti-Semitism, alsoappeared to clearly reflect the U.S. government’s per-sistent uneasiness with international scrutiny of U.S.policy—foreign or domestic— with respect to race dis-crimination.

Any meaningful application of human rights tothe United States will certainly confront the persistentproblem of racial discrimination, still one of the clear-est examples of what Yale law professor Harold Kohcalls the U.S. government’s “negative exceptional-ism”—the double standard whereby the United Statespromotes a principle abroad that it fails to apply suc-cessfully at home. If the past experiences of W.E.B.Dubois or The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. areany indication, however, the use of human rights toconfront racism in the United States might bring new

perspectives and principles to bear on this country’scentral and most enduring struggle. Such a perspectivecan be seen in Justices Ginsburg and Breyers’ concur-ring opinion to the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 23, 2003decision upholding Michigan Law School’s use of affir-mative action, which favorably cited the InternationalConvention on the Elimination of all Forms of RacialDiscrimination. Unlike domestic law, the internation-al human rights standards oblige governments indetermining possible racist practices to look at notonly intent but also effect.

As U.S. activists attempt to reclaim human rightsto combat race discrimination, they find themselvesencountering U.S. exceptionalism more generally.Over the last half of the previous century, this policyhas also formed the basis for a far more extensivedefense of national sovereignty affecting issues includ-ing arms control, the environment, international jus-tice, rights for women, children, immigrants, prisonersas well as economic, social and cultural human rights.To be sure, there are some notable exceptions, includ-ing for example the ratification of the Torture Conven-tion and the passage of legislation to implement itdomestically, but these stand out against a long recordof opposition to domestic application of internationallaw and agreements.

The social justice activists featured in this volumedo not underestimate this exceptionalism, but they arealso determined to confront it. Developments post-September 11, 2001 have reminded them dramaticallythat no one in the United States or any other countrycan take for granted their government’s adherence tofundamental principles of human rights. Every nationand all people need ultimate recourse to an alternativeethical and legal authority in those instances, howeverrare they may be, when their own government fallsshort of the rule of law. Sovereignty should not be aguarantee of impunity, particularly, one could argue,for the most powerful country in the world.

B. Legal, institutional and popular resistance:Even as U.S. social activists begin to challenge U.S.exceptionalism with a mounting degree of urgency,they confront the immense legal, institutional and cultural difficulties of applying human rights in the

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United States. The legal challenges are formidable andrun the gamut from conflicts between internationaland domestic law, to interpretive disputes, to theabsence of implementing legislation for ratifiedtreaties, to judicial unfamiliarity, to the legitimateconcerns of litigators about taking on any of these dif-ficulties, particularly when they themselves areunlikely to have any meaningful human rights expert-ise. These challenges are not readily overcome in theabsence of a multifaceted legal education, training andstrategizing effort.

The challenges facing the legal community havetheir counterparts in U.S. social justice groups moregenerally. These obstacles cross issue areas, methodsand strategies and essentially boil down to an under-standable caution about the universal, indivisible, par-ticipatory and multi-dimensional character of ahuman rights approach. Most of the groups featured inthis volume find in themselves or in their potentialallies a deep resistance to framing their work inhuman rather than single-identity/issue terms. Theyalso resist taking on economic, social and culturalrights, as well as placing those most affected at the cen-ter of their work or engaging multidimensional advo-cacy strategies. These are legitimate concerns. Theyalso reflect what is perhaps the most damaging legacyof U.S. exceptionalism: the inward-oriented nature ofmuch U.S. social justice work. As Ellen Barry, an attor-ney and prisoner-rights activist whose work is dis-cussed in part four told us, “our biggest obstacle. . . isour own insularity.”

To undo this tendency is not easy. It requires anintensive effort, involving a combination of humanrights education, training, organizing and, most impor-tant, the concrete experience of trying new approach-es. Any educator, organizer, fact-finder, policy advo-cate or litigator who uses human rights must also beprepared to handle the likely backlash from those whobelieve that the United States is far ahead of othercountries. By its nature, human rights work challengesthe notion of U.S. superiority that has arguablybecome part of the national identity. Some advocateshave been surprised by the vehement reactions theyreceive, even from loyal allies, when they have sug-

gested that the United States fails to measure up to agiven human rights standard. For this reason alone itwould be unwise to advocate the use of human rightsin every instance.

C. False patriotism: The threat of backlashreflects another major obstacle to the effort to “bringhuman rights home” to the United States: the generalpublic’s knowledge about human rights. While nocurrent data exists, it is probably safe to assume thatthe 1998 Human Rights U.S.A. poll, which found that92 percent of Americans had never heard of the Uni-versal Declaration of Human Rights, still has profoundsignificance. It means, in essence, that U.S. humanrights activists are trying to reshape U.S. societyaccording to a philosophy and framework of rightsthat most people either have not heard of or have beentaught to think of as foreign. As but one indication ofthe depth of this problem, virtually all of U.S. humanrights activists in this set of case studies said that asthey adopted a human rights approach to their work,they found themselves increasingly questioned abouttheir patriotism.

This suggests that among the deepest challengesfacing the emergent U.S. human rights movement—be it the exceptionalism of the U. S. government, theconcerns of social justice advocates, or the attitudes ofthe general public—is how to communicate its mes-sage. This task is complicated and will have to be tack-led with considerable patience and expertise.

Ultimately, the need to disrupt the increasinglyworrisome connection between unilateralism andpatriotism in the United States is one of the major rea-sons why activists argue that U.S. human rights workis so crucial. They see efforts to make concrete linksbetween local and global rights activists, and betweendomestic and international systems of justice, as oneway to help change the increasingly popular percep-tion in this country that cooperative engagement withthe world is somehow un-American. In this sense,human rights activists in the United States are trying,along with their counterparts in many others disci-plines, to reclaim the traditions in this country thatcontributed so much to the creation of the UnitedNations and the Universal Declaration of Human

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Rights and, as Langston Hughes once so memorablysaid, “let America be America again.”

What are the U.S. human rights move-ment’s immediate needs?Finally, what is needed to build a powerful human

rights movement in the United States? As describedabove, the challenges of overcoming the political andlegal obstacles to using human rights in the UnitedStates are formidable. There is no one-size-fits-allapproach or easy path to follow. Even more than withmost advocacy work, taking full advantage of theopportunities presented by the use of human rights inthis country requires time to learn, to experiment andto plan. Unfortunately, most U.S. social justice advo-cates have few such opportunities: Academic trainingin U.S. human rights work remains limited, domesticand international rights organizations based in theUnited States have yet to fully take on this project, andneither of these sectors has sufficient opportunity tostrategize, be it to coordinate their own efforts or tocommunicate their message to others. A substantialinvestment in the creation of a legal, institutional andpopular culture of human rights in the United States isclearly necessary.

But for such an investment in human rights in theUnited States to bear fruit, it will need to be accompa-nied by a specific effort to support the work of pio-neering U.S. human rights groups, like those featuredin this volume, which are leading the charge to bringhuman rights home to this country. With creativityand determination these groups have already accom-

plished a great deal. But in most cases they are fragileand severely under-funded. One of them, the Women’sRights Network, passed out of existence largely due tolack of funds in the course of these case studies. To takethe work of existing U.S. human rights groups any fur-ther requires a meaningful and immediate infusion ofpolitical, moral, institutional and financial support.Without such a targeted effort to build the capacityand visibility of these U.S. human rights groups, theopportunity to transform U.S. society more generallymay be squandered.

What is the role of the funding community?Given the enormous challenges facing the emerg-

ing U.S. human rights movement, and the many thingsneeded to bring about its full realization, such anundertaking requires active leadership. Building a U.S.movement for human rights is less about conformingto existing domestic reality than it is about reshapingthat reality in light of a progressive alternative. Forsuch a fundamentally transformative effort to succeed,it will require an equally ingenious funding strategy.

Some elements of that strategy are already in place.In 2003, the Atlantic Philanthropies and the JEHT foun-dation launched U.S. human rights initiatives, joining apioneering group of regional, family and communitydonors that includes the Shaler Adams Foundation, theOtto Bremer Foundation and the California Women’sFoundation, which recently awarded $250,000 ingrants to address race, gender and human rights in theUnited States. The work reflected in this volume repre-sents a commitment of nearly $7 million by the Ford

Any educator, organizer, fact-finder, policyadvocate or litigator who uses human rightsmust also be prepared to handle the likelybacklash from those who believe that theUnited States is far ahead of other countries.

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Foundation. The Foundation fully expects to continuethat support in the years to come.

As these and other foundations begin to respondto requests for support to add a human rights dimen-sion to a range of social-justice initiatives in the Unit-ed States, they are likely to confront many of the samechallenges faced by their existing or potentialgrantees. These include a) their own institutionalizedexceptionalism, b) the need for training on humanrights ideas, law, methods and strategies and c) the lackof dedicated resources for this effort.

A. Institutionalized exceptionalism: Until veryrecently, foundations either supported human rightswork exclusively out of their international programsor had U.S. programs that did not fund human rights.This includes the Ford Foundation, which until sevenyears ago maintained separate programs for humanand civil rights. In 1996, Susan Berresford, the founda-tion’s president, merged these units, which greatlyfacilitated the development of a more integratedapproach to rights work. Today all of the issue-specific program areas within the foundation’s HumanRights Unit have both international and domesticcomponents, with the human rights framework oper-ating wherever appropriate as bridge between the two.

Among donors more generally similar linkagesare beginning to be made between international anddomestic or human and civil rights funding, but suchan integrated approach is still largely the exception tothe rule. A survey of donors published by the FordFoundation in 2002 (A Revolution of the Mind: FundingHuman Rights in the United States) found that manyfunders thought of human rights as “international”and thereby exclusive of the United States or as involv-ing “egregious” abuse that “does not happen here.”

B. Absence of in-house expertise: The concep-tual problem of dividing civil from human and localfrom global rights support has not only structural butalso practical effects. Most foundations that fundexclusively in the United States lack expertise inhuman rights. Those that fund internationally, includ-ing those based in Europe, often have little exposure tothe internal workings of the United States. Overcom-ing this split will require a collaborative effort from

both groups. The need for such an effort was reaf-firmed by the International Human Rights Funders’Group at its July 2003 semi-annual meeting in NewYork City, at which it created a subcommittee onhuman rights in the United States.

C. Lack of dedicated resources: Given the sub-stantial conceptual, structural and practical obstaclesto funding U.S. human rights work, it is perhaps notsurprising that this field is severely underfunded.Until 2003, the Ford Foundation was to our knowledgeone of the few national foundations to earmarkresources for U.S. human rights work, particularly asconducted by domestic rights groups. It is our hopethat with Ford’s ongoing commitment, the involve-ment of Atlantic Philanthropies, the JEHT Foundationand others and the growing interest of donors moregenerally, the resource gap that afflicts the U.S. humanrights movement can be closed and its transformativework can expand.

Conclusion The struggle to build a movement for human

rights in the United States is not for the faint of heart.It seeks a transformation in U.S. society akin to thechanges wrought by the civil, women’s, gay and laborrights movements of the previous century. It faces sub-stantial obstacles, not least of which is the increasingunilateralism of the U. S. government and its long his-tory of exceptionalism with respect to the domesticapplication of human rights. Reversing these trendswill require a concerted effort. U.S. social justiceactivists, the donor community and the Americanpublic must work together to restore this nation’scommitment to the fundamental principle that theequal and inalienable rights of all human beings arethe basis for freedom, justice and peace in the world.Let it be said by future generations that in the 21st cen-tury, the United States finally gave its full attention tothe words that The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King,Jr. uttered nearly 40 years ago: “I think it is necessary torealize that we have moved from the era of civil rightsto the era of human rights.”

Larry Cox, Senior Program OfficerDorothy Q. Thomas, Senior Consultant

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Part I: Domestic and International LitigationHuman rights law offersstronger protections than U.S. statutes, and lawyersare increasingly turning tothese legal precepts toframe social justice issues more broadly and, in somecases, win binding rulings.

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The starting placeIn 1996 Azi Kambule, a South African teenager liv-

ing in Mississippi with his mother, was charged withcapital murder for his involvement in a car jacking andthe killing of a 31-year-old woman. Azi, who was 16 atthe time of the crime, was not present when his accom-plice murdered the victim or even aware of the slaying.The prosecutor in the case sought the death penalty.Five years earlier the United Nations had adopted theConvention on the Rights of the Child, which explicit-ly prohibits capital punishment for defendants whoare under 18 years old when they commit a crime. TheUnited States is the only nation that has not ratifiedthe treaty. Azi’s dire predicament, emblematic of thegrowing divide between the use of the death penalty inthe United States and the fervent international opin-ion that condemns it, provided death-penalty foes witha dramatic, if desperate, opportunity.

The teenager’s case became a lightning rod. Twocampaigns, mounted by anti death-penalty activists,fueled an international uproar and brought pressure onthe Mississippi district attorney to reverse his decision.The Stop Killing Kids Campaign focused domesticattention on juvenile execution as a violation of inter-national human rights norms. The International Com-mission of Concern, led by Archbishop Desmond Tutuof South Africa, worked in the domestic and interna-tional arenas to publicize Azi’s life-and-death plight.

CHAPTER ONE: DEATH PENALTY

Members of the Bruderhof religious community protest outside death row at Greene Prison in Pennsylvania.

Both initiatives were effective demonstrations of thepower, and some of the challenges, of invoking interna-tional human rights standards to alter domestic policies.

The modern era of the U.S. death penalty—andthe renewed movement to abolish it—began in 1976when the Supreme Court reinstated capital punish-ment after having struck it down in 1972. Since the rul-ing, the United States has revealed a grim and growingappetite for state-sanctioned executions. Currently, 38states and the federal government, including the mili-tary, can impose a death sentence. Almost 4,000 peopleare on death row, and only China executes more peo-ple annually. International and domestic anti death-penalty organizations argue that the U.S. death penal-ty system is fallible, tainted with race and class biasand reserved primarily for the poor. A 1990 report bythe U.S. General Accounting Office highlights a “pat-tern of evidence indicating racial disparities in thecharging, sentencing and imposition of the deathpenalty.” Over half of inmates on death row are peopleof color, who make up a much lower percentage of theoverall population. Those awaiting execution are alsooverwhelmingly poor. At the time of their trials, 95percent could not afford an attorney. Since resumptionof the death penalty, more than 100 individuals havebeen freed from death row because they were subse-quently found innocent.

The death penalty is also a potent political issue.

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By portraying the United States as out of touch with international humanrights norms, anti death-penalty activists make slow but steady gains.

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty

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State and federal lawmakers, Democrats and Republi-cans alike, have been expanding the kinds of crimespunishable by death. In the mid-1990s, the former abo-litionist states of Kansas and New York reinstated cap-ital punishment. Other states widened the scope ofexisting statutes: Alabama, Colorado, Delaware, Geor-gia, Indiana, New Hampshire, North Carolina andTennessee enacted laws that increased the number ofaggravating circumstances that qualify a murder as acapital crime.

The turning pointWhile the United States has increased its use of

the death penalty over the past 25 years, internationalsentiment has moved in the opposite direction, whichis what prompted the National Coalition to Abolishthe Death Penalty to frame its U.S. work in humanrights terms. In 1976, the same year the United Statesreinstated the death sentence, the InternationalCovenant on Civil and Political Rights, which theUnited States has since signed and ratified, took effect.Although the covenant does not ban the use of thedeath penalty, it upholds a person’s “inherent right tolife,” limits the use of the death penalty to “the mostserious crimes” and prohibits it from being imposedon pregnant women or juveniles offenders. (A laterprotocol to the covenant, which the United States hasnot signed, calls on states to abolish the death penaltyin all cases.) Since 1990 only six countries have execut-ed people for crimes committed when they were under18 years old—Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen,Iran and the Untied States—and the United States hasexecuted more juveniles than the other five combined.

Internationally, however, the trend toward aboli-tion of the death penalty has accelerated in the pastdecade. In 1993, the International War Crimes Tri-bunals for the former Yugoslavia rejected the death

penalty, even for the most heinous crimes such asgenocide. The Rwanda tribunal took the same posi-tion. In February 2002, the Council of Europe’s Com-mittee of Ministers adopted Protocol 13 to the Euro-pean Convention on Human Rights, the first legallybinding international treaty to abolish the deathpenalty under all circumstances.

In response to the 1976 Supreme Court ruling, antideath-penalty activists from organizations such as theAmerican Civil Liberties Union and the NationalAssociation for the Advancement of Colored Peoplemobilized to form the National Coalition Against theDeath Penalty. Shortly after its founding, the organiza-tion was renamed the National Coalition to Abolish theDeath Penalty, leaving no doubt about its mission. “Weare not the coalition for information about the deathpenalty, and we’re not the coalition for ethical stan-dards for the death penalty. We are the coalition to abol-ish the death penalty,” said former executive directorSteve Hawkins. The coalition uses grassroots organiz-ing, public education, advocacy and media outreach toattain its single-minded goal. Its 5,000 members belongto affiliated groups ranging from state organizationslike the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty tointernational NGO’s such as Amnesty International.

The journeyGiven the stance of the U.S. Supreme Court, some

anti death-penalty advocates choose to focus theirefforts on crucial reform, working for legislation thatwould set standards for legal defense in capital cases,require the preservation of crime scene evidence for aspecified number of years and mandate that states payfor DNA testing. While these proposed legislativechanges would improve investigations of seriouscrimes and help prevent false capital convictions, antideath-penalty activists also believe their most power-

“We are not the coalition for information about the death penalty, and we’re not the coalitionfor ethical standards for the death penalty. We are the coalition to abolish the death penalty.”

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ful argument is using international human rights stan-dards to set a higher ethical and legal benchmark.

Against this backdrop of human rights principles,the United States seems out of touch on the deathpenalty issue. The National Coalition to Abolish theDeath Penalty and other activist organizations drawattention to this isolation and encourage internationalscrutiny of U.S. death penalty practices. The coalitionand its affiliated organizations meet with internation-al human rights officials, arrange visits by U.N. humanrights monitors, issue reports to international humanrights committees and monitor death penalty casesfiled with the Inter-American Commission on HumanRights (IACHR), the human rights arm of the Organiza-tion of American States. The IACHR is the primaryhuman rights arm of the Organization of AmericanStates, the world’s oldest regional international organ-ization, comprising 35 countries in the WesternHemisphere. The IACHR examines petitions filed byindividuals claiming violations of their rights by theirgovernments. The United States was actively involvedin the creation of the commission and continues to beone of its primary political supporters. The IACHR andU.N., in turn, bolster the position of the coalition byissuing reports and statements critical of the deathpenalty in the United States.

This steady drumbeat of condemnation from theinternational human rights community can be aneffective argument to persuade state and federal offi-cials to rethink their views on executions. Speedy Rice,a law professor at Gonzaga University in Spokane,Wash., has written several amicus briefs on behalf ofdeath row clients that invoke the human rights viola-tion argument. “Each time the U.S. death penalty is dis-cussed and condemned in the international forum youraise the opportunities to change the minds or views ofdecision makers,” Rice said.

The accomplishmentsOpposition to the death penalty is clearly articu-

lated in a number of international treaties and by vari-ous international human rights bodies, but awarenessof these conventions is low among U.S. governmentofficials, the legal community and the general public.As a result, anti death-penalty advocates in the U.S.

allocate considerable resources to public educationand advocacy campaigns. The National Coalition toAbolish the Death Penalty, among others, has focusedits energies on the issue of death penalties for juveniles.During the campaign to save Azi Kambule, the coali-tion launched petition drives and letter-writing cam-paigns, raised funds for his legal defense and generatedmedia coverage. In fact sheets and fliers, the campaignsunderscored the racial bias in sentencing—66 percentof those sentenced to death for crimes committed asjuveniles are minorities. It also emphasized the over-whelming international rejection of the death penaltyand accused the U.S. of violating international treaties.

Building on experience gained during the cam-paigns to save Azi, the coalition in January of 2003,kicked off the Campaign to End Juvenile Executions,aimed at the state level. The coalition also initiated anonline organizing tool, the Legislative Action Center,which provides state-by-state updates and summariesof all current and pending death penalty legislation, aswell as contact information for state legislators. Thesite enables visitors to send instant messages to law-makers to register their views on pending bills, mora-toriums and related death penalty issues.

In 2002 anti death-penalty advocates in Indiana leda successful effort to pass legislation banning the exe-cution of juvenile offenders. The legislation’s primarysponsor argued that the United States was one of ahandful of countries that still executed juveniles andthat the U.S. government banned the practice for feder-al offenses. “Organizers used this information to drivehome the point that Indiana was out of step with therest of the world and with U.S. Congress,” Hawkins said.

During the push to save Azi Kambule, the humanrights angle was prominent in press reports. The StopKilling Kids Campaign and other efforts emphasizedhow U.S. death penalty laws collided with internationalhuman rights standards. Outlets as varied as Time, TheWall Street Journal, the Jackson, Miss. Clarion-Ledgerand specialty magazines like Seventeen and Vibe dis-cussed Azi’s and other cases in terms of human rightsviolations. The coalition has now included a mediaguide on the Legislative Action Center, allowing activiststo identify local media contacts by using zip codes or citysearches to send instant messages or letters to the editor.

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THE NATIONAL COALITION TO ABOLISH THE DEATH PENALTY 25

It’s difficult to gauge how big a role the coalition’shuman-rights-based campaign played in saving the lifeof Azi Kambule. The judge was influenced by moreprosaic legal issues, ruling that because the districtattorney had cut a deal with the co-defendant for a lifesentence in exchange for testimony, Azi could not facethe death sentence. Eventually, the murder chargeagainst Azi was dropped, and he was convicted of carjacking and sentenced to 30 years in jail. His attorneysare working to appeal the sentence.

Perhaps more important, the coalition’s and othergroups’ ongoing use of human rights to generate sus-tained international condemnation of government-sanctioned executions have helped encourage a grad-ual reexamination of death penalty practices in theUnited States. Several important shifts occurred in 2002.In Atkins vs. Virginia the Supreme Court ruled that exe-cuting a mentally retarded person violates the EighthAmendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.Justice John Paul Stevens’s majority opinion noted,“Within the world community the imposition of thedeath penalty for crimes committed by mentallyretarded offenders is overwhelmingly disapproved.” InRing vs. Arizona the Court required juries, not judges, toconsider the facts that might lead to a death sentence.

On the state level, after controversies erupted overegregious sentencing errors, the governors of Marylandand Illinois instituted moratoriums on executionswhile expert committees investigated death penaltyprocedures. As he left office, former Illinois GovernorGeorge Ryan made news across the world when hecommuted the death sentences of 167 inmates. SpeedyRice believes that the application of international stan-dards is having a positive long-term effect on thedeath-penalty issue. “It is almost impossible to have abroad-based discussion on the death penalty and notsee human rights as part of the debate.”

The obstaclesDespite more general successes, using the human-

rights framework in U.S. courts in particular still facessubstantial hurdles. Many lawyers who defend clientsin capital cases are reluctant to use human-rights-based arguments because they are unfamiliar andunpersuasive to judges and juries. While outside criti-

cism and international intervention can bring height-ened attention to death penalty issues, grassroots abo-litionist campaigns can trigger a backlash from localcitizens. Many Americans view visits by U.N. humanrights officials to death row inmates or letters from thePope seeking clemency as interference in domesticaffairs. “There is a cost to using the human rightsapproach,” said Rice. “There is some risk of alienationin a local debate, particularly when confronted withthe prevailing arrogant view that all things Americanare good and just.”

This skepticism also resides in the U.S. SupremeCourt. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist reflected theisolationist stance of many Americans in his dissent inAtkins vs. Virginia: “I fail to see how the views of othercountries regarding the punishment of their citizensprovide any support for the court’s ultimate determi-nation.” But at a time when global alliances are becom-ing increasingly important to the United States, thecountry’s continued use of the death penalty couldbecome an ever more problematic irritant in its rela-tions with the world community. Europeans in partic-ular lean toward the elimination of capital punish-ment, and the National Coalition to Abolish the DeathPenalty is trying to pressure European Union membersto reexamine financial and trade agreements with U.S.states that sanction the death penalty. “The applica-tion of the death penalty in the United States is hin-dering U.S. diplomatic efforts abroad,” Hawkins said.“Paradoxically, our country’s peculiar fixation with thedeath penalty is making us less safe as we struggle toprotect our country against the threat of terrorism.”

The road aheadWill human rights arguments succeed in chang-

ing American attitudes about the death penalty? Noone is predicting absolute victory anytime soon, butinternational pressure and domestic human rightsadvocacy on this fundamental moral issue will onlyincrease. As Rick Halperin, a veteran activist with theTexas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and Am-nesty International, said: “The death penalty defineswho we are as a people and defines our national char-acter. I want to end the idea that extermination of peo-ple is acceptable.” �

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The starting placeIn 1996, the federal government passed sweeping

legislation that ended the 60-year-old entitlement tocash benefits for the poor. It was, as President Clintonfamously intoned, “the end of welfare as we know it.”The legislation, officially titled the Personal Responsi-bility and Work Reconciliation Act, placed lifetimelimits on receipt of benefits, imposed a work require-ment on recipients—primarily women and their chil-dren—and eliminated benefits to legal immigrantsand people convicted of felony drug offenses. To mostgovernment officials and much of the general public,the enactment of welfare reform was seen as welcomeand wildly successful. After the new law went intoeffect, there was a dramatic drop in the welfare rolls.

The turning pointWhile the number of people on the rolls has gone

steadily down from 5.8 million in 2000 to 5 million in2002, for example, poverty has increased. During thissame two-year period the number of people living inpoverty rose from 31.6 million to 34.6 million. Beforeand after the passage of the reform legislation, anti-poverty activists from across the country had cam-

CHAPTER TWO: ECONOMIC RIGHTS

The Center for Economic and Social Rights

A coalition of poor and homeless people, students and anti-poverty activists spearheaded by the Kensington WelfareRights Union takes over a Housing and Urban Developmenthouse in Philadelphia left empty for over a year.

paigned vigorously to highlight and eliminate the neg-ative aspects of the law. Employing a variety of tactics,including marches, civil disobedience, educationalworkshops, reports, and litigation, these activists werefighting an uphill battle against one of the more notableand popular pieces of reform legislation in recentyears. Against this backdrop, anti-poverty groups beganconsidering new tactics to document the harm thereforms were visiting on those most in need. In a bolddeparture from more traditional means of advocacyand public education, a strategy built on economichuman rights began to take shape.

The journeyThe Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Cam-

paign, a network of grassroots anti-poverty organiza-tions, was formed in 1997 as a response to welfarereform (see study on page 50). It’s membership is madeup primarily of those who are living in poverty or onwelfare. Spearheaded by the Kensington WelfareRights Union, a Philadelphia-based advocacy organiza-tion, the campaign chose the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights to show that U.S. welfare policies oftenviolate human rights. As part of this effort, organiza-

26 CLOSE TO HOME

For the first time U.S. anti-poverty groups, faced with restrictions on cashbenefits to the poor, petition international bodies to charge the UnitedStates with economic human rights violations.

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The Poor People’s Economic Human RightsCampaign is a network of grassroots, anti-poverty organizations whose member-ship is made up primarily of those who are living in poverty.

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28 CLOSE TO HOME

tions under the umbrella of the rights campaign begangathering testimony from their constituents who feltthe effects of welfare reform legislation on their lives.These testimonies were collected in hopes of using aninternational human rights mechanism or body tohold the U.S. government accountable for these viola-tions of economic rights.

Enter Cathy Albisa, the director of the U.S. Programat The Center for Economic and Social Rights, who hadpreviously worked at The Center for Reproductive Lawand Policy, the International Women’s Human RightsLaw Clinic at the City University of New York, and thehuman rights institute at Columbia University LawSchool. Albisa and her organization would play a keyrole in devising a legal strategy to counter the new wel-fare policies using human rights.

The Brooklyn-based Center for Economic andSocial Rights was established in 1993 to promote socialjustice through human rights advocacy. The center’sU.S. Program focuses on strengthening the capacity ofU.S.-based anti-poverty activists to use human rights.“The methodology we’ve adopted at the center is notsupposed to create a detached legal project,” saidAlbisa. By supporting grassroots initiatives through-out the country, the center helps link local organizers’efforts directly to international human rights stan-

dards and mechanisms and provides resources andtraining along the way. “We support people who docampaigns. We do trainings with activists and lawyers,do documentation, write reports, and share informa-tion with various human rights bodies. We come inand figure out together how best to support their exist-ing work.”

In the U.S. courts, public welfare benefits havebeen determined to be “a privilege” and not a “right.”Because U.S. law imposes no governmental duty toensure social and economic rights, many lawyersallied with the poor people’s campaign, includingprominent civil rights lawyer Peter Weiss, wereintrigued by the idea of using an international mecha-nism to hold the U.S. government accountable for pro-tecting these rights. After several years and numeroussetbacks, their goal was finally realized.

The accomplishmentsIn July 2003, Albisa, along with Monica Leggett, a

young mother of three in West Virginia who hadreached her lifetime limit on benefits, the Poor People’sEconomic Human Rights Campaign and others, filed apetition with the Inter-American Commission onHuman Rights, specifically challenging the reformlaw’s five-year lifetime limit on receiving benefits. It

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THE CENTER FOR ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RIGHTS 29

was the first petition of its kind to charge the U.S. gov-ernment with economic human rights violations andthe first to challenge U.S. welfare policy before an inter-national human rights body. For the petitioners, how-ever, preparing for the filing had been a bumpy road.

In deciding to file the petition with the IACHR,The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaignactivists and attorneys were looking for a legal processto emphasize the U.S. government’s obligation underinternational human rights law to end poverty. Severalpractical factors also made IACHR the right choice: itslegal format is flexible regarding admissible evidence,the commission holds hearings where both parties arerequired to attend and the U.S. government had histor-ically responded to commission requests. Also, unlikeother human rights bodies based overseas, the com-mission headquarters are located in Washington, D.C.;organizers with The Poor People’s Economic HumanRights Campaign wanted to file the petition just aheadof a month-long protest march in August 2003 com-memorating the 35th anniversary of The ReverendMartin Luther King, Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign.

An earlier version of the petition was first filed inOctober 1999, but then withdrawn for procedural rea-sons. Over the next several years, Albisa shepherded itthrough many drafts as it traveled with her while sheworked at several different human rights institutions.The original petition was a broad challenge to the wel-fare reform legislation. Based on an assertion of theright to social welfare and security, the petition called

the reform law a retreat from government responsibil-ity to ensure economic rights. The petition specificallyattacked the legislation’s work requirements, arbitrarytime limits, and denial of benefits to immigrants andconvicted felons as economic human rights violations.

In early 1999, Albisa and the other attorneys onthe legal team were having difficulty identifying wel-fare recipients who would be willing to be named aspetitioners. Given their general state of economicinstability, welfare recipients were hard to find, andeven harder to keep track of in an on-going manner.Attorneys also encountered problems in establishing acausal relationship between the harm the person wasexperiencing and the actual economic rights violation.It was easier to establish harm by invoking broaderpoverty statistics than proving an individual’s circum-stances were a direct result of the welfare law. Thesehurdles meant that the original petition was filedmostly by non-governmental organizations that repre-sented welfare recipients, rather than by the recipientsthemselves.

In April 2000, the IACHR sent Albisa a letter say-ing that in order for the petition to be accepted peti-tioners needed to be individually named victims whowere being affected by the violations and whosedomestic legal remedies for obtaining or retaining ben-efits had been exhausted. After reconsidering theirstrategy, the legal team and the activists decided in late2001 to narrow its focus to a specific population of thepoor that had lost its benefits due to the 1996 welfare

Monica Leggett, exhausted her lifetime welfare limit, andalong with the PPEHRC, filed a petition challenging thereform law’s five-year lifetime limit on receiving benefits.

It was the first petition of its kind to charge the U.S. government with economic human rights violations and the first to challenge U.S. welfarepolicy before an international human rights body.

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30 CLOSE TO HOME

law reform. And one of its provisions—the five-yearlifetime limit on benefits—was beginning to impactsignificant numbers of welfare recipients.

The five-year ban was playing out in dramatic fash-ion in West Virginia. One of the poorest states in thecountry, almost 18 percent of its population lives belowthe poverty line compared with 11 percent nationwide.Poverty in the state is particularly stark among house