Past Media and Updates

an up-hill battle

by Robert James Parsons, le Courrier (Geneva), Friday, 21 July 2006, page 1

All the indications were that the meeting this week between the United States and the United Nations Human Rights Committee would not amount to anything more than a dialogue of the deaf, little different from what happened in May with the Committee Against Torture. Rather than admit itself beaten even before starting, United States civil society saw in the encounter a reason to redouble its efforts. A year and half ago already, U.S. NGOs disturbed by the deterioration of the rule of law in their country decided to act, aiming at the organization of a vast coalition that could exploit the least occasion when the superpower might be put on the spot before the whole world. As the situation has continued to deteriorate in the United States, the NGO coalition has not hesitated to sound the alarm by demonstrating to what extend the country is slipping toward outright dictatorship.

Eric Tars, a lawyer based in Philadelphia, and Lisa Crooms, a law professor at Howard University in Washington, among others, spared no effort to rally the little grass roots organizations to their cause, insisting that human rights are indivisible and that the struggle of one is the struggle of all. The coalition made its first big move by sending a delegation of of thirteen NGOs to the Committee Against Torture, armed with detailed reports. These reports allowed the Committee to contest the version of a United States delegation of some thirty members carefully selected for a propaganda exercise such as the  U.N. treaty oversight bodies had never seen until then.

At the same time, with a view to the second meeting, the coalition -- swollen to 142 NGOs -- organized itself to produce a "shadow report", of some 300 pages as an alternative to the government's official report and dealing with the abuses reported by numerous NGOs, from the smallest to the giants such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch. This outstanding work received no small amount of praise form the members of the Committee. Not surprisingly, the discussion with the governmental delegation was heated and in the end extended to a third, unscheduled, sitting.

The coalition's efforts made possible a discussion, often in depth, of dozens of rights violations, such as life incarceration of persons who have committed a crime when minors, the situation of workers, abuses suffered by women in prison, the expropriation of the lands of indigenous peoples, secret prisons, the very concept of the war on terror etc. Lisa Crooms, Eric Tars and their colleagues were unanimous: both the report and the trip of some sixty persons to Geneva were not in vain.

The next step is a mass mobilization of citizens. This means a national-level program to inform and sensitize the public. The coalition intends to refer to the rights recognized in the United Nations conventions and to encourage United States citizens to insist that their government assume its human rights responsibilities.