A human rights day intervention
The future for human rights protection in the United States looks grim. The incoming administration promises among other things mass deportation, criminalization of women’s health care, repeal of voting rights, a crackdown on journalists, promotion of disinformation and propaganda, strengthening of corporate impunity, increased surveillance, degradation of academic freedom, discrimination against LGBTQI+ communities, and assaults on labor. Federal efforts, joined by state and local (and private, even paramilitary-style) enforcement, will be driven by a far-right vision at war with principles of equality, dignity, legality, social cohesion, access to justice, and opportunity. Yet the rule-of-law mechanisms enforcing constraint on government authorities, already badly frayed, will be even more severely tested, with potentially catastrophic consequences for people across the country.
Are we prepared?
Civil society organizations will mobilize against the assault. Litigation, representation, organization, lobbying and campaigning will be essential, but perhaps we will need more, a public and multistakeholder way to monitor, investigate, document, report and implicate the next administration in its promised systematic violations of America’s human rights obligations. Organizations will do the required defense, protection and accountability work in specific areas, but a national institution could help build an effective human rights culture and demonstrate to Americans how these violations undermine not only civil and political rights but economic, social and cultural rights.
Ideally, it would be official and independent, sanctioned by national legislation, but for obvious reasons that is not to be. In 2022, nearly 130 organizational and individual signatories urged the Biden administration to begin the process of building an American human rights institution. Several members of Congress, the American Bar Association and the national network of local human rights commissions joined the call. The administration ignored it. But the absence of federal government support does not mean that civil society cannot build. Some institutions around the world have emerged from civil society initiatives and non-governmental organizations. Civil society can generate its own forms of accountability.
In its absence of national human rights infrastructure, the United States is a definite outlier. Nearly all democracies have an independent national human rights body intended to hold public authorities accountable. Some convene public hearings, conduct research and education, and offer dispute settlement mechanisms, while others advise legislatures, advocate policy, publicize evidence of violations, or intervene in litigation as amicus curiae. Most do a combination of these things, bringing human rights to the public, explaining why they matter, putting pressure on authorities to end their non-compliance even without the kind of enforcement power typically available to courts.
Given the scope of what the next administration is promising, the existing tools of human rights defense, as important as they are, may simply be insufficient. If so, civil society should see this as a time for building something capable of demonstrating the full nature and consequences of the assault on rights and presenting a vision of American freedom and prosperity rooted in human rights. A national institution for human rights in America could build on and collaborate with efforts at state and local levels, enabling the deep participation of individuals and communities, bringing into focus the national impetus and the local consequences of an administration assault on rights.
American human rights defenders face a challenge: Can we respond to the coming assault on rights with a different, popular vision of tolerance, community, and rights-protection, one not only rooted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document inspired in part by FDR’s Four Freedoms and the American Constitution, but is embraced by communities across the country? Are we institutionally, organizationally prepared for what’s coming and what’s required?
Maybe we are, and the need for building should not be prioritized. But if it’s possible to envision a multistakeholder human rights forum for the United States, the work to realize it should begin now with a roadmap to identify key elements of an independent civil society body that mirrors the best of the world’s human rights approaches. It is possible to envision an institution empowered to shed light on alleged systemic human rights violations through public hearings and documentation, to identify systematic abuses with national and local features, and to submit amicus curiae and legislative and policy advice at all levels of government nationwide; organized as a national hub with collaborations with and support for state and local actors; and built for both national information-gathering and dissemination, as a resource for those at local levels, and for grassroots engagement, involving individuals with civic, academic, religious and other institutional backgrounds.
Resistance is about protection, refusal, disobedience, and argument. But it can also be about vision and building. This may be a time for building at a moment when the national levers of power will all be working against a culture of human rights compliance and accountability. Maybe there is opportunity in this moment.
