SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT:

United States, Human rights
and Presidential Elections

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BACKGROUND

HUMAN RIGHTS UNDER WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON

>> On December 10, 1998, the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, President Clinton issued Executive Order 13107 entitled "Implementation of Human Rights Treaties." It stated that "it shall be the policy and practice of the Government of the United States … fully to respect and implement its obligations under the international human rights treaties to which it is a party." It called on all executive departments and agencies of the government to "maintain a current awareness of United States international human rights obligations". It established an Interagency Working Group on Human Rights Treaties charged with, inter alia, developing plans for public outreach and education concerning the human rights treaties to which the U.S. is a party.

The Interagency Working Group does not have a website and its activity to date hovers around the zero mark. This is a good example of what William Greider, one of our premier political commentators, calls "Clinton's many retreats from large purpose, accompanied always by small, symbolic gestures."

In examining the US record on human rights, it is well to remember President Carter's trenchant remark, "America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, human rights invented America." Activists in the United States welcome the relatively recent interest of their non-American colleagues in the state of human rights in this country. Even hyperpowers need a little help from their friends when it comes to measuring their compliance with universal norms, an area in which no country can lay claim to a perfect score. Indeed, given the aggressive nature of US human rights preaching to the rest of the world, it would not be unfair to subject the preacher to a heightened degree of scrutiny.

This, then, will be an attempt at a short summary of how human rights have fared in the Clinton era. Given the constraints of space, it can only touch the highlights (or lowlights).

To begin with social and economic rights: Not long ago, we had a President - Lyndon Johnson - who wanted to be remembered by history for his war on poverty. Today we have a President whom some historians will remember for his war on the poor. The Democratic Party, traditionally the party of the working masses and immigrants, has become virtually indistinguishable from the Republican party in its concern for Wall Street and the middle class at the expense of the bottom third of our population. "Welfare reform", with its unobjectionable aim of moving people off welfare and into the economy has in fact moved former welfare recipients and the working poor into bare subsistence, or outright poverty. A study by the respected Community Service Society of New York, featured on the front page of the New York Times on October 1, reports that, since 1992, the number of jobs paying less than $ 25,000 a year has climbed nearly four times as fast as those paying $25,000 to $ 75,000 and that "an alarming number of families in New York City are unable to earn enough to achieve an acceptable standard of living." The picture is much the same in the rest of the country. What is particularly alarming about these figures is that, with the continuing export of factory jobs to less developed countries as a result of Clinton's "free trade" policy, and the growth of the service sector in the post-industrial society, the number of people in low wage employment is likely to increase in the foreseeable future.

Because a living wage is beyond the reach of millions of American workers, many are forced to work inhuman hours. The Times story is accompanied by pictures of an elderly black woman who must work 55 hours a week to make ends meet and a white man who supplements his full-time job as a security guard by working an additional 20 hours a week as a janitor, in order to support his family.

Add to this a school system which, for the poor, is more custodial than educational and a largely privatized health system which rewards doctors for drastic cuts in medical care and you have a society which falls far short of meeting the norms required by the International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights (which the United States signed under President Carter, but has never ratified.)

The bright side of this gloomy picture is that, as Cathy Albisa's article in this issue demonstrates, and as the TV coverage of Seattle, Washington and Prague have shown, the words of the Universal Declaration and the Covenants are inspiring, here and abroad, a rights-based movement of resistance to this rights-ignoring system.

Turning to civil and political rights, while the rights of women, gay people, racial minorities and indigenous groups are still very far from what they should be by international standards, one cannot say that things have become markedly worse over the last decade. There have been both advances and retreats. One does, however, detect a worrisome ennui with questions of feminism, racism, Indian and immigrant rights and sexual orientation, a sort of "What else do they want? Haven't we - the straight male white folks - made enough concessions already?" Witness the growing opposition to affirmative action.

In the area of criminal justice - or rather injustice - on the other hand, there have been momentous negative developments. There is, first of all, the astounding growth in the prison population, up from about 325,000 in 1973 to about two million today, the highest per capita rate in the world. Half of all prisoners are serving time for nonviolent crimes, mostly drug related . And the upward trend continues, not only in absolute numbers, but also in sentences and time served. The average sentence in 1997 was 43 months, compared with 38 in 1990. Mandatory sentences are partly responsible for this trend. Another little known contributing factor is that the hundreds of new prisons built in recent years in or near small rural communities have been an economic boon for these communities, prompting local legislators to oppose laws that would decriminalize certain nonviolent offenses or provide for lighter penalties. "Crime Pays", as a recent article in the Washington Post put it.

Conditions in many jails and prisons, increasingly run by for profit private corporations, are a national disgrace and politicians are vying with each other in being "tough on crime and criminals". The slogan "no more country club prisons" - as if there had ever been any - leads to measures reducing or eliminating prisoner access to medical drugs, recreational equipment, books and newspapers and even phone calls to lawyers and family members. A new type of "Supermax" prison specializes in prisoners who spend virtually all their time in solitary confinement under particularly onerous conditions. Juveniles are detained in adult facilities and as many as 15% of all inmates should be in mental institutions rather than prisons.

Another 15% figure is shocking: Although that is estimated to be the percentage of black drug users, six blacks are arrested for drug offenses for every white, and blacks account for 49% of felony convictions for possession and 56% of drug offenders in state prisons.

Even more disturbing than the number of prisoners and the conditions under which they live is the number of persons sentenced to death and the conditions under which they die.
As of July 2000, 38 states plus the U.S. Government and the U.S.military had death penalty statutes; only 12 states did not. Since capital punishment was reinstituted in 1976, there were 650 executions through July and 3682 inmates were on death row. Not only does this flout what is by now arguably a norm of customary law, but the U.S. violates the specific prohibitions in ICCPR against executing persons who were juveniles or mentally ill when they committed their crimes. Or rather, IF they committed crimes: Anti-death penalty advocates have identified no less than 70 persons who were on death row at one time and subsequently exonerated. Here again, the statistics show a great disparity in the treatment of whites and persons of color: A recent study of federal death penalty cases by the Justice Department found that nearly 80 percent of inmates currently in the federal penalty system are black, Hispanic or of another minority group and that minorities account for 74 percent of cases in which federal prosecutors seek the death penalty.

The subjects of police brutality and "anti-terrorist" legislation will be dealt with in separate articles, as will the good news: the increasing reliance on the Filartiga jurisprudence by alien human rights victims in American courts. The bad news discussed above cannot be laid entirely at President Clinton's door. He did have a Republican Congress to deal with and much of what is wrong with the criminal system happens at the state and not the federal level. But he must take the blame for a failure of moral leadership. Pierre Trudeau, so recently gone to his Jesuit heaven, taught constitutional law before entering politics, as did Bill Clinton. But he gave Canada a Constitution and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Clinton, who could have been a south-of-the border Trudeau, instead gave us "welfare reform", the Anti-Terrorism Act. and Executive Order 13107, a small, symbolic gesture.

PETER WEISS
Vice President Center for Constitutional Rights

Abolition !

The Struggle for the universal abolition

To my eyes, nothing could be more wrong than such reactions. In the campaign for the abolition of the death penalty there is not the slightest intent or design to harm the United States, on the contrary. It should be recalled that the abolitionist struggle has always had an international dimension. Because the death penalty constitutes an irreversible violation of the first of all Human Rights, the Right to Life, abolition has to be universal. It is the ultimate aim of all those who fight for abolition. May I recall that the fight waged by the NGOs against torture, arbitrary detention and executions without judgement, has always been international, just as much the fight against the death penalty? Already in 1977, when the Nobel Peace prize was awarded to Amnesty International, a major Convention was held in Stockholm in order to mobilize public opinion against the death penalty in the world. Since then, numerous international motions and texts have been adopted calling for the abolition of the death penalty. The most important one was the second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, aiming at the abolition of the death penalty, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1989, which has been ratified to date by 43 States.

Our American friends should not, therefore, be impatient when we recall the requirement and the importance of the abolition of the death penalty in the United States. They find themselves in the same situation as France in 1981, which at the time was the only Western European State to still have the death penalty. In those days, all our European friends, in the European Community or in the Council of Europe, implored us, at times in very harsh words, to relegate capital punishment to the museum of horrors. How could it be, they said, that France, which claims to be the homeland of human rights, still had recourse to the death penalty, such a cruel and archaic form of punishment ?

The same is true today for the United States. Our American friends should measure in this respect the harm done to their great country by a barbaric practice that puts the United States in the same homicidal group as China, Iran, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Saudi Arabia, all countries that have nothing in common with American democracy. They should also ask themselves why almost all democracies in the world have abolished the death penalty. Today it is banished from the whole of Europe by the sixth additional protocol to the European Convention of Human Rights, which prohibits States party to the Convention from having recourse to the death penalty in peace time. The Convention has been ratified by the 38 States Members of the Council of Europe. It has barred capital punishment from European law.

Who could imagine that the political leaders of these European States would have given up the death penalty in this way if it had shown itself to be indispensable for the protection of the life and safety of their citizens ? All the studies carried out in all the States where the death penalty has been abolished show that this has had no influence on the evolution of violent crime. Even in the United States the most recent studies show that in the 12 abolitionist Sates violent crime does not exceed the national average, and that it is increasing less than in the States that frequently apply the death penalty.

In the world as it is, the fight for universal abolition cannot be won or make progress if abolition does not win the day in the United States. Today they are the only superpower, and the dominant cultural model. Hence the importance, for all abolitionists, Europeans in particular, of the abolitionist cause in the United States.

How could the present practice of the death penalty in the United States not cause anguish ? In 1999, almost 100 convicted persons were executed. Since the beginning of the year 2000, 69 people have been executed, including 5 who were minors at the time of the crime, in violation of the provisions of the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. At the time of writing there are nearly 3,700 persons in the death row in the United States. There were 600 in 1980. In Texas in particular, since Mr. George W. Bush has been Governor of the State, almost 150 persons have been executed. That is more than all the executions carried out in France for ordinary crimes from 1946 to 1981. And the population of Texas is only 20 million.

As is always the case, everywhere, the poisons vectored by the death penalty and which afflict justice and democracy are to be found in the United States ;

First, social inequality. Nearly all the persons condemned to death come from the least favored sections of society. This situation leads to a striking inequality in the chances for an accused person to escape the death penalty in trials where it could apply. Most of the accused are unable to meet the costs of a proper defense, compared to the considerable means available to the prosecution. They are only assisted by court-appointed lawyers, ill-paid and often inexperienced. The figures are eloquent: according to a study carried out by Columbia University, out of the 5,760 death sentences handed down between 1977 and 1995, 4,578 were reversed on appeal, 68% for serious breaches, either violations of the law, or serious dereliction of duty on the part of the lawyers, or judicial errors that came to light subsequently.

Social and financial inequality is made even worse by the unavowed but inevitable racism of some juries. It is true that jurors are reminded in court that they should never give way to racial prejudice or discrimination. But racism clearly appears in the statistics. Whereas Afro-Americans represent 12% of the American population, they make up 34% of the persons executed. For Federal Justice, the percentage of " blacks " condemned to death is 48%, against 20% for " whites ".

The consequence of such a situation is the multiplicity of risks of judicial errors. Since 1973, 83 persons sentenced to death were later found innocent, and released after many years in the death row. According to studies carried out in Illinois, 66% of the 285 death sentences passed there were the object of serious doubts concerning the substance or the procedure that led to the sentence. That is what led the Governor of the State, George Ryan, to decree a moratorium in 1999 on the death penalty.

It is not only the European abolitionists who point to these facts. They can be found in the reports by NGOs and in studies carried out by American universities. They are denounced by the American abolitionists, whose dedication and courage we pay tribute to. In the struggle they are waging in the United States we owe them solidarity and support. We must help them with all the means at our disposal. By helping to mobilize international public opinion in favor of given individuals condemned to death and liable to be executed. By inviting international public opinion, and particularly American public opinion, to fully realize the uselessness, the structural injustice and the cruel and degrading nature of the death penalty. And also by providing as much financial assistance as we can to the lawyers of the accused in order to contribute to the means of their defense.

The combat for the universal abolition of the death penalty today has to be waged in the United States, just as twenty years ago the struggle for abolition in Europe concerned France. It is up to our American abolitionist friends to wage it. It is up to us, European abolitionists, and particularly French abolitionists, to contribute to it.

Robert Badinter
Senator
Former President of the Constitutional Council

Death Penalty

Death Penalty in United-States

Marie-Agnès Combesque

Criminal Injustice

CASE STUDIES IN OPPRESSION -
THE RESURGENCE OF THE SIGNS AND SYMBOLS OF SLAVERY

>> The notion that there is protection for African-American people against the brutality of prison guards and police is no more true now than it was when African-Americans stood as human cargo on auction blocks across the deep south. From slavery to now, African-Americans have been cannon fodder, used as target practice, thrown away in jails and prisons and murdered by those acting under the color of law.

This article will address issues involving those who are incarcerated in the deep south with a particular emphasis on the state of Mississippi. It is important to understand that while this article will provide case studies in oppression in the state of Mississippi, the reality of what goes on in Mississippi is symptomatic of a frightening trend that is part of an epidemic of suspicious deaths, modern day slavery, brutality, harassment and other human rights violations that occur everyday across the United States. In fact, while the United States continues to project itself as a champion of human rights, it is one of the most notorious violators to be found anywhere in the world. As the great freedom fighter Frederick Douglass once said in his famous Independence Day address:

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the every-day practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival...

Carter G. Woodson (ed.), Negro Orators and Their Orations (Washing, 1925).

The Clinton Administration has its own legacy of perpetuating human rights abuses in the criminal justice system. It is no secret that Bill Clinton is an ardent supporter of the death penalty. Many are loathed to remember the story of how Bill Clinton traveled back from the campaign trail to Little Rock, Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector who was a mentally retarded man. The horror of Rector's execution supervised by Clinton, is that Rector was so impaired he left his desert on his tray after his last meal and commented that he would get it when he got back. Under Clinton's watch, children who are incarcerated with adults are gang-raped, forced into prostitution and are violated in other unspeakable ways. While jails are being built at alarming rates, schools in poor communities and communities of color are woefully ill-equipped to provide students with an adequate education. It is no secret that there is a direct relationship between lack of educational opportunities and juvenile delinquency and adult crime in later years. Many of the federal grants that provided college educations to prisoners have been discontinued. Thus, uneducated prisoners who are released into a world that lacks equal opportunities for all, are forced to resort to some of the very activities that caused them to go to prison in the first place. Recidivism is a by-product of this catch-22 situation.

The United States has executed more people than any other country in the industrialized world. It has executed more juveniles and is one of six countries in the world that executes individuals for crimes they committed before they were 18-years old. The statistics of those on death row are staggering. There are 3,682 people on death row in the United States. (NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Death Row USA, July 1, 2000).
Approximately seventy-five people have been found innocent and snatched from the jaws of death before they were executed. The problem of "innocence" has caused some states like Illinois to declare a moratorium on executions until further studies are done. In fact, many abolitionists in the US are calling for a nation-wide moratorium on the death penalty.

From 1987 until now, suspicious deaths in jails and prisons in the state of Mississippi have increased. Approximately seventy-five prisoners, mostly poor and African-American, have been found hanging in shower stalls, in their cells and other places like "strange fruit" on a tree. All of these deaths, no matter how suspicious in nature, were classified as suicides. In the case of Cedric Walker: Here was a young African-American man who was 21-years old, and had just become the father of a baby boy. Walker only had seven months left to serve in Parchman prison. It is a well-known fact that he was asthmatic and needed medical attention from time to time. Because of deliberate indifference on the part of prison officials during one of Walker's particularly severe attacks, he lay gasping for breath, begging to see a doctor. His pleas for help were ignored and he died in his cell. Prison officials never acknowledged that in his final hours, Walker repeatedly requested medical attention. And so, a suicide was manufactured to cover-up deliberate neglect.

Parchman prison is a farm prison where prisoners work the fields and harvest their own food. On repressive work release programs, they are forced to provide labor without being paid wages. As prisoners work in the fields on a blistering hot day, it is not uncommon to see prison guards on horseback riding the range to keep order and instill fear. Brutality at the hands of guards is a daily occurrence. Overcrowding is a condition that causes prisoners to be pressed together like sardines in single cells, sometimes three-men-deep. When tempers flair because of the untenable conditions prisoners are forced to live under, guards restore order through beatings and other inhumane forms of punishment.

Prisoners are not safe and cannot rely on the authorities to provide them with protection while they serve their time. They are forced to participate in humiliating displays and other sports for the pleasure of their jailors. For example, prisoners who were CCR clients reported an incident where they were forced to dance naked on a tabletop before women prison guards who were throwing money at them. In another case, prisoners complained of a roof that leaked for more than two years in their housing unit. The water cascaded down the walls and poured in on them as they slept in wet beds in wet clothing. This case was a case where the lower court found for the prisoners who had been victims of cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution. But, the Mississippi Department of Corrections appealed and the prisoners lost the relief that they were entitled to.

To talk about conditions of confinement in the twenty-first century is to talk about the re-occurrence of chain gangs, the incarceration of juveniles with adults, the growing number of women who are incarcerated and the astounding growth of the prison industry. Locking people up in the United States is "big business." The prison industrial complex system reaps maximum profits from clamp-down slave labor. The United States has one of the largest prison populations in the world. According to a recent report from the United States Department of Justice's Bureau of Statistics, there are 1.24 million prisoners in U.S. prisons. (CNN.com, August 2, 1998: U.S. Prison Population Increased at a Slower Rate in 1997).
As more prisons are being built, Wall Street investors and other profiteers boast about their new found commodity, human cargo in US prisons. It is no different from the cargo that stood on the auction block in the era of human bondage.

As Americans prepare to go to the election polls to elect another president, we are forced to choose between Al Gore, who is a proponent of the death penalty and George Bush, who is a serial killer. Progressive forces are lining up behind Al Gore because he represents the lesser of two evils. Yet, we know that we must begin to develop political alternatives that will force the United States to look at the repressive apparatus called the criminal justice system that grinds down humanity and systematically eliminates those who cannot afford the price of survival. We are in a human rights crisis in the United States and neither the democrats nor the republicans appear to have an answer. We will tread water with Gore because we know we will surely drown with Dr. Death (George Bush).

Stay strong and fight on.

Written by Attorney Jaribu Hill,
Director of the Southern Regional Office
of the Center for Constitutional Rights in Greenville, Mississippi.

Arbitrary

Racial Profiling
and the Crisis of Law Enforcement Misconduct in the United States
by Ron Daniels

>>Police brutality and misconduct are certainly not a new phenomenon in American society, particularly as it relates to Black people and people of color. In the most recent period, the brutal torture of Abner Louima and the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo by officers of the New York Police Department catapulted the issue of police brutality and misconduct onto the national and international stage. Indeed, largely because of the aggressive, zero tolerance strategy of policing propounded by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his insensitivity towards and frayed relations with people of color communities, New York emerged as the epicenter of the national crisis of police brutality and misconduct - a crisis which prompted the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) to conduct a series of hearings across the country examining the issue of law enforcement misconduct.

High profile incidents of police brutality involving the use of torture and deadly force like the Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo cases in New York have tended to capture the national and international spotlight. However, what has fueled much of the anger and outrage of people in communities of color across the country is the widespread use of racial profiling by police authorities as a crime reduction methodology. Indeed, the pattern and practice of race based traffic stops has become so pervasive over the past decade that the term "Driving While Black" (DWB) emerged in the popular vernacular of the Black community to describe what vast numbers of Blacks view as the humiliating and unconstitutional targeting of Black people and people of color as criminals in American society.

A study conducted by Professor David A. Harris of the University of Toledo
which examined the performance of 12 officers of the State Police engaged in drug interdiction revealed that of 732 motorists stopped and searched between 1995 and 1996, 75 percent were African American and 5 percent were Hispanic. "Of the 12 officers involved, 2 stopped only African Americans. Over 95 percent of the drivers stopped by one officer were African Americans and 80 percent of the drivers stopped by six officers were African American." Professor Harris' findings were similar in the State of Florida. Based on a review of video-taped stops along a stretch of I-95 in Volusia County, Professor Harris found that "more than 70 percent of the persons stopped ... were African American or Hispanic. African Americans, however, made up 12 percent of the driving age population in Florida."

As previously noted, the issue of racial profiling is not confined to traffic stops. Amadou Diallo was the victim of another method of racial profiling that is every bit as pervasive, aggravating and sometimes fatal as race based traffic stops - massive sweeps and stop and frisk operations in communities of color carried out by specialized, paramilitary units like the Street Crimes Unit in New York City. Almost without exception, police departments across the country have developed paramilitary units to employ military styled crime reduction strategies targeted at "high crime" areas in communities of color. In the May 31, 1999 issue of The Nation magazine, Christian Parenti reported that "throughout the nation, paramilitary SWAT or tactical policing - that is, law enforcement that uses the equipment, training, rhetoric and group tactics of war - is on the rise." Referencing the work of sociologist Peter Kraska, Parenti suggests that there are now more than 30,000 of these paramilitary units in the nation. These units are on the prowl routinely conducting what many civil rights organizations and police reform proponents believe are unconstitutional operations in communities of color.

According to data published in the New York Times of February 15, 1999, the NYPD's infamous Street Crimes Unit (it was officers from this unit that killed Amadou Diallo) conducted some 45,000 reported stops and frisks from 1997-1998 in search of guns (It is important to note that these are reported stops. Officials of the NYPD admit that as many as 1 of 3 or 1 of 5 or even 1 of 10 stops are never recorded. Using the most conservative estimate of 1 of 3, this would mean that nearly 150,000 people were actually stopped by the NYPD from 1997 to 1998). Of the 45,000 reported stops, 10,000 were arrested and of those arrested 5,000 cases were dismissed. Therefore, 40,000 innocent people were stopped solely on the basis of the fact that they either lived in a "high crime" neighborhood or fit the "profile" of a "probable suspect." A random survey conducted by the New York Daily News March 26, 1999, in selected Black and Latino neighborhoods found that out of 100 people interviewed, 88 had been stopped and frisked by the NYPD.

Black people and people of color rightfully feel that the Constitution of the United States should provide safeguards and protections against what appears to them to be abusive police behavior. A March 2000 Government Accounting Office Report submitted to Congressman James Clyburn, Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus explicitly addresses this point. It states in part that "the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments prohibit law enforcement officers from engaging in discriminatory behavior on the basis of the individual's race. The Fifth Amendment protects against discrimination by federal law enforcement officers and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects against discrimination by state and local law enforcement officers... The Fourth Amendment guarantees the rights of people to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures." In addition, the report indicates that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 and the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1994 all have anti-discrimination provisions which should protect citizens from discriminatory behavior by police authorities. There is virtually a unanimous view among public interest legal institutions and civil rights organizations, however, that widespread use of the kind of stop and frisk methods and sweeps noted above constitute a wholesale disregard and violation of the rights of people who are victimized by these tactics. It is
tantamount to throwing the Constitutional and statutory protections cited above in the thrash can. Determined to set an example which would compel police authorities nationwide to respect these constitutional and statutory protections, on March 8, 1999, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a federal civil rights class action law suit against the NYPD, seeking to shut the Street Crimes Unit down. The suit argues that the practices of the Street Crimes Unit violate the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because of
the use of racial profiling. A victory in this milestone case would strike a significant blow against the onerous practice of racial profiling in this country. However, litigation is only one component of what must be an all out assault on the unconstitutional use of race based strategies of policing, crime reduction and control.

In order to effectively confront the current epidemic of police brutality and misconduct there is a critical need to examine the root causes of the crisis. Congressman John Conyers, the Dean of the Congressional Black Caucus and Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, has observed that much of the increase in police misconduct is attributable to the War on Drugs. As Timothy Egan states in an article in the February 15th edition of the New York Times: "... In the 1980s crack cocaine scared the country, and the criminal justice system has never been the same." The "scare" produced dramatic changes in policing strategies, sentencing policy in the courts and the growth of prisons and jails. The War on Drugs is in large measure predicated on the presumption that stopping drug trafficking in communities color is the key to "victory."

As the statistics on the Street Crimes Unit in New York indicate, huge numbers of innocent people are subjected to the indignity of being stopped and frisked on the basis of the fact that some members of their race or ethnic group have been identified as participants in illegal activities. Every member of a group is rendered a "suspect" simply because some members of the group may be involved in wrongdoing. The presumption of innocent is therefore is cast aside in the effort to win the "war." As the Progressive Policy Institute's Report notes, "the vast majority of serial killers are white. Yet no one would argue that because all white people are potential serial killers, they should be subject to random police stops." Not only would one no one make this argument, many Blacks feel that if Whites were subjected to such treatment there would be a national uproar so ferocious that a change of policy would be virtually instantaneous. In fact one of the sources of tension in the Black community results from the belief that the Black people are the primary targets of the War on Drugs even though there is substantial data which suggests that drug usage and trafficking is higher among Whites.

Finally, in terms of the root causes, it is extremely important to situate the current crisis of police brutality and misconduct within a social, economic and political context. Bluntly stated, with the rise to prominence and power of conservatives in our country, the War on Drugs has replaced the War on Poverty. As Jerome Miller, President of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives asserts in an article entitled "Race, Imprisonment and Oppression" in the February 28th edition of the Boston Globe, "the bottom line is that crime policy has become a substitute for public policy ... Over the past 20 years there has been a terrible propensity on the part of politicians to deal with difficult economic, social, family and personal problems with a meat axe approach to the criminal justice system." The practice of racial profiling, more police and prisons has been instituted as a substitute for policies which promote social, economic and racial justice for Black people and people of color. What large numbers of Blacks and people of color painfully experience in various aspects of their daily lives is racial profiling instead of racial justice. This formula of ill conceived public policy and policing practices has produced a highly combustible chemistry in communities of color throughout the nation.

Last year the Center for Constitutional Rights hosted a National Symposium on Community Based Constitutionally Compliant Policing. The Symposium was designed to focus on new models of policing that stress the meaningful involvement and partnership of people in communities with police authorities. There must be a fundamental shift away from the para-military models of policing that have been adopted by so many police departments in the country towards the adoption of community based models where community people have an influential and effective role in assisting the police to devise and implement strategies for security and crime reduction in their neighborhoods.

I end this Report on Law Enforcement Misconduct with the concluding passage from my article in Police Brutality, an anthology on this issue edited by Jill Nelson.

"It is not enough ... to simply train police to function differently in our communities as they pursue the mission of maintaining peace and security. The familiar slogan, no justice no peace is in reality a formula for crime reduction and the creation of wholesome and secure communities. Unless and until this nation makes a firm and irreversible commitment to ensure that all of the people who live in this society will enjoy access to the same social and economic rights - good jobs, quality education, housing, health care, clean environment - instability, violence and crime will continue to be a problem which no amount or method policing can contain for long. As community based organizations, civil rights/human rights organizations and public interest advocacy groups struggle against police brutality and misconduct, the fight to create a new paradigm of policing must necessarily be seen as a part of the broader struggle to create a more just and humane society. Therefore, the demand for police reform and accountability must necessarily be coupled with the demand for public policies which promote social, economic and racial justice. Our goal must be nothing short of creating a just, humane and peaceful society. If there is no justice, the will be no peace in these United States of America."

Ron Daniels is Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has played a leading role in bringing the crisis of police brutality and misconduct to the nation's attention.

Social Injustice

Economical and Social Rights : WAITING ON A 50 YEAR OLD PROMISE

In the particular case of the United States, despite rhetoric to the contrary, the government has acted in ways that significantly undermine the human rights system. The United States has blocked the creation of a truly autonomous International Criminal Court, refused to ratify major human rights treaties domestically, as well as refused to implement the treaties it has ratified. The United States has also consistently resisted - both domestically and on the global stage - acknowledging the fundamental and inalienable nature of economic and social rights.

The United States does not yet possess the political, legal, or social structure necessary to guarantee against violations of social and economic rights. This glaring failure is fundamentally unacceptable in light of its rapidly growing resource rich economy. Currently in the United States, hunger is rising, higher employment has not eliminated poverty, public schools continue to be inadequate and a failure to children who must depend on the public education system, and homelessness persists. Moreover, systemic gender and race discrimination in the United States often manifests itself in economic terms. Yet, the disproportionate effect that violations of economic rights have on minorities and women in the United States is rarely recognized as discrimination in public discourse. In part, this is likely a result of the United States' overall failure to recognize basic economic rights.

Where are the tools to address these issues? They are not in the United States Constitution - which up until now the United States Supreme Court has interpreted as not providing any social and economic rights. They are not found in United States legislation, which has increasingly eroded what minimum "guarantees" there were and has always found these issues to be a matter of policy, not rights. The only tools available in the United States domestic context are provided by international instruments that the United States has taken part in drafting and creating, but not enforcing domestically. And some of them, although not all, are binding on the United States despite the United State's disregard of those norms in practice.

Grassroots organizers in the United States have discovered this and learned that human rights and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights touch a chord for the poor in this country, who are often desperate to be socially acknowledged by the dominant mainstream culture. Just learning about the Declaration and its incorporation of economic and social rights can make a difference to everyday life. For example, knowing you have a right to food when seeking food assistance makes the degrading and often obstructionist treatment received at government offices not simply the inevitable cost of seeking a handout, but a violation. And claiming those rights can be a common ground for mobilizing people by changing the lens through which they see the world.

The U.S.-based Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU) is one particularly important and dynamic group working in the area of economic and social rights. KWRU is a poor people's organization with forty affiliates across the country. It is staffed entirely by volunteers, most who are poor and many who receive welfare or have at some point. This poor people's group organizes around economic human rights in the United States. They assist any poor person who walks into their office, whether that person needs housing, food, or just someone to listen. But everyone helped is expected to become a helper, and in this way they organize and mobilize the poor. KWRU also runs mobile human rights schools by traveling across the country teaching other poor people about the Universal Declaration and economic human rights. They run human rights houses, where they provide housing for those the government shuts out. They work with all sectors of society, in a cross-sectoral way, and believe that all sectors of society are necessary to build a human rights culture that recognizes economic and social rights. They have built relationships with the social work community and have helped organize a conscientious objector pledge drive, whereby social workers sign pledges agreeing not to enforce U.S. government's welfare cut-backs. In its mobilizing efforts KWRU also works and reaches out to social scientists, student groups, policy experts, religious institutions and the legal community.

In their work with the legal community, they have brought together legal services lawyers, public defenders, constitutional litigators, and international human rights lawyers - sectors of the legal community who do not often work together. Although the Court system in the U.S. holds little promise at this time for economic human rights, KWRU felt that legal work was an essential part of the movement, as in U.S. culture the "law" is seen as the natural "home" for rights. Whether correct or not, this cultural perspective makes legal work an essential part of changing the rights landscape. KWRU has called upon the progressive US legal community to engage in work that legitimates economic human rights in the US, and lends credibility to the conceptual underpinnings of their organizing.

One key piece of this strategy is to use regional and international organs to put pressure on the U.S. Consequently, KWRU organized an inter-disciplinary team to develop a petition against the US arguing that the dramatic welfare cuts put in place in 1996 were a violation of regional human rights standards in the Inter-American system. This petition, submitted to the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, relies on the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, which is binding on the United States and contains the economic and social rights guarantees found in the Universal Declaration. (The petition has not yet officially been served on the US, but it should be processed shortly).

Although, the Inter-American Commission does not have the same enforcement mechanisms at its disposal as United States courts, it can be part of an incredibly important process of turning the light of human rights in the direction of the United States. This light will surface the reality of economic human rights violations and force government and civil society to confront them. It will also return some dignity to the poor who are part of a movement claiming the right to participate in United States society as full citizens, a right that cannot be actualized without the guarantee of economic and social human rights as its base.

Poor people who have testified in popular tribunals organized by KWRU not only speak of deprivation of food and housing, they also attest to the incredible anger they feel at the degrading treatment they suffer at the hands of state agencies and the impossible and contradictory expectations placed on them by the welfare system. (For example, single women with children are expected to work at a wage level that does not allow them to afford to pay for adequate childcare. In a system that does not provide enough subsidized childcare, single women with children are nevertheless expected to ensure that their children are not neglected. When they fail to do the impossible, they are at risk of both losing custody of their children and losing assistance from the State.)

One of the greatest tragedies resulting from the failure to ensure economic and social rights, is that children suffer disproportionately from poverty in the United States. If we only consider the specter of hungry, undereducated, and inadequately protected children, that in itself is enough to make the protection of economic human rights the most compelling of issues for the United States.

Advocates from all professions must collectively work to eliminate these abuses -- both to realize the rights of the poor in the United States and to protect the poor elsewhere, as the United States social and economic policy models have enormous influence globally. The KWRU model strives to change the underlying culture of American society that does not recognize the right to social security and an adequate standard of living. Its methods focus on mobilizing the poor so that everyone helped also becomes a mobilizer for change, and on reaching out across all sectors of society to support the poor in their efforts to claim their rights.

Cathy albisa

Trade-Unions

The Crisis of the American Trade-Unionism

Marianne Debouzi

Impunity

United States: in favour of international courts only when it suits them

>> The United States are neither really for, nor really against international courts. Their reaction to the developments in international criminal law are pragmatic, case by case, using a partial and selective approach.

When the United States seek to legitimise the deployment of their military forces abroad or try to re-affirm the importance of their say at international conferences or when their own national interests in certain countries are at stake, they are not reluctant to publicly and vigorously denounce human rights violations. Under these circumstances, the United States generally call for the implementation of mechanisms for the repression of crime at international level, but solely on condition that they can actually have control over them. What's more, they only actively support the fight against impunity if their nationals are guaranteed immunity against any potential proceedings at international level. Only when these conditions are fulfilled are the United States in favour of establishing international courts. However, if you are bold enough to raise before the Senate the spectre of a US ratification of the Statute of the ICC, they will throw back at you that this is tantamount to a 'declaration of war'.1) The US government has to work with an extremely conservative Senate, a Congress that is no less conservative, and Secretaries of State, especially in the Pentagon, that are little inclined to accept the new mechanisms for the establishment of international courts if, from near or from far, they pose a threat to the sovereignty of the United States and its fundamental interests.

Practical implementation of the US government's theory of using a partial and selective approach

In the same way as the United States categorically refuse to subordinate themselves to traditional UN mechanisms, they deny any jurisdiction of supra-national courts, especially criminal courts, whatsoever over crimes committed by its own nationals, while, in the name of their military supremacy and economic hegemony, they impose a unilateral prerogative for their partial and selective response to human rights violations by foreign governments The United States only take an interest in international courts if they are useful for promoting their own interests. How else could we otherwise explain the fact that the United States denounce the atrocities committed by Israel or the grave violations committed by the Iraqi government forces in the 1980s, whilst a few years later, following the invasion of Kuwait, the United States vigorously denounced the regime of Saddam Hussein, going so far as to call for the establishment of an international criminal tribunal to bring the perpetrators of these crimes to justice.
It is both paradoxical and shocking that the United States should be opposed to the future ICC, whilst at the same time and within the same international institution, namely the UN, they fervently demand the establishment of international criminal courts for Iraq, Cambodia and Sierra Leone.

Effective control: the essential condition for support by the US government

The United States only agree to take action for the fight against impunity if they obtain the guarantee that they can effectively take control over international crime repression mechanisms. The United States are not in principle against the establishment of international criminal courts. On the contrary, it should be noted that ever since 1945, the United States have been one of the principal supporters of international criminal tribunals. From Nueremberg to the future criminal tribunals for Sierra Leone and Cambodia, the United States have always shown themselves in favour of such initiatives. Only, this is tied to the absolute condition that they are the ones who should have actual control over the functioning and jurisdiction of such international criminal courts. Thus, the United States are only in favour of the establishment of supra-national criminal courts if this is based on a resolution of the Security Council. Numerous speeches by Bill Clinton show that the US executive was in favour of establishing a permanent international criminal court. But, in fact, the US support of a permanent international criminal court, seen as the logical consequence or continuation of the present ad hoc tribunals, implied that this court should be subordinated to the UN Security Council, to enable the United States to use their veto if their national interests are at stake.But for once, the 120 states that accepted the Statute of the ICC in Rome on 17 July 1998 did not yield to the pressure from the United States.

International courts: one strategy among others to consolidate the power of the US government

These last observations, however, did not prevent the United States from shelling Kosovo without prior consent of the Security Council. Whilst they endorse the indictment against Slobodan Milosevic by the The Hague Tribunal, they refuse to be subjected to it themselves. Is this a sign of ignorance or disdain? In an article published in the New York Times on 3rd January 2000, Mrs. Orentlicher, Professor of Law at the American University, however, believes that the United States, through their intervention in Kosovo, tacitly accepted the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. In the same way, the United States have submitted a draft proposal for the establishment of a tribunal for Sierra Leone to the Security Council. Now, there is no doubt that the United States understand that the tribunal should primarily have jurisdiction over the RUF rebels who took 500 blue helmets hostage for several weeks and tried to launch a march on Freetown, in breach of the Lomé peace agreements. But international courts are used by the United States only as one strategy among others to consolidate their power in West Africa and the establishment of an ad hoc tribunal is a welcome method to pursue this goal. In addition, by providing a large amount of funding for this project, the United States will have the guarantee to have control over its functioning.
The FIDH considers that the fight against impunity, which is intrinsically one and indivisible, does not tolerate half-heartedness, one way or another. One is either for or against international courts, but not in favour of themonly when it suits a country's national interests: it is up to the United States to make up their minds!

Jeanne Sulzer
Emmanuelle Duverger

Footnotes
1. Phrase used by Jesse Helms, extremely right-wing President of the US Senate's Commission of Foreign Affairs, threatening Washington if they decided to sign the Statute of the ICC.

2. The United States submitted their five-year report on the implementation of the provisions of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights five years late, in the same way as they are reluctant to present their report to the Committee Against All Forms of Racial Discrimination or as they continue to refuse to acknowledge the right of the individual to put in petitions to the Committee on Human Rights.

Bill Clinton and Human Rights in Latin America

Luis Guillermo