What We Expect From America
U.S. leadership was critical in building the global human-rights agenda from the ground up, beginning with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. More than half a century later, that agenda and the movement it inspired are in need of renewed U.S. leadership at every level, from grass-roots activism to government policy and actions, nationally…
Shame in Our Own House
In its relations with the rest of the world, America struggles with a profound contradiction. On the one hand, our country has been a pioneer in the human-rights movement, providing much of the language and inspiration for international efforts to win equality for all. On the other hand, our government has repeatedly blocked attempts to…
Economic Security: A Human Right
Are social and economic rights foreign to American traditions? Are they inconsistent with our laissez-faire freedom-loving culture? Consider a defining moment in our nation’s history, when national security was also threatened and when an American president argued that freedom itself required social and economic rights. In our own day, we should be paying close attention…
International Holdout
Twenty-five years ago this December, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), a global “bill of rights” that is both visionary and comprehensive. In the waning days of his presidency, Jimmy Carter hurriedly signed the convention and sent it to the…
From the Front Lines
Early in the Clinton administration, the United Nations Human Rights Commission was holding hearings in New York on the compliance of various member states — including, for the first time, the United States — with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. I was there because I was working at Human Rights Watch, but…
On America’s Double Standard
When the United States holds Taliban detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without Geneva Convention hearings, then decries the failure of others to accord Geneva Convention protections to their American prisoners, it supports a double standard. When George W. Bush tries to “unsign” the International Criminal Court (ICC) treaty that Bill Clinton signed in 2000, yet…
Holding America Accountable
Eleanor Roosevelt, the mother of the international human-rights movement, famously said: “Where do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home. So close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school…
Inalienable Rights
The United States, famous as a nation of immigrants, should also be infamous for its bouts of anti-immigrant sentiment. Often our intolerance has been fueled by national-security fears. At other times, Americans have made misguided assumptions about who immigrants are and the rights that protect them. Foreigners in the United States illegally get a lot…
Criminal Justice and the Erosion of Rights
While human-rights observers have rightly focused on terrorism-related developments in the U.S. criminal-justice system, the trend toward limited procedural protections for defendants and a shrinking judicial role well predates the September 11 attacks. Indeed, security has been a central justification for rights-limiting changes in the criminal-justice system for decades. Much like the war on terrorism…
The Partial Rule of Law
Slobodan Milosevic is in the dock for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. For all the delays and procedural maneuvering, his trial marks a milestone in the extraordinary development of international criminal law from Nuremberg forward. In addition to the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, tribunals composed of national and…
A Lawless State
There’s a paradox at the heart of U.S. foreign policy: As the Bush administration asserts unilateral global power, the influence and respect of the United States hits rock bottom, and as the United States professes its desire to expand democratic rights around the world, its actions undermine its stated goals. No issue in this political…
Domestic Abuse
PICKSTOWN, S.D. — Sandy wade was 6 when she was sent away to St. Paul’s Indian Mission, a boarding school overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) on the Yankton Sioux reservation. At first, things weren’t so bad. She got three meals a day — a welcome change from home, where she and her…
Good Medicine
Across the political spectrum, alarm bells are ringing about Medicare, America’s giant health program for the aged and disabled. To conservatives, Medicare is a huge, Kremlin-esque bureaucracy destined to soak up more and more of the American economy. To critics on the left, it’s an inadequate program that nonetheless siphons off increasingly limited funds that…
Who Killed Camp David?
The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace By Dennis Ross • Farrar, Straus and Giroux • 864 pages • $35.00 The historic Camp David talks during the summer of 2000 failed, so the conventional wisdom goes, because Yasir Arafat rejected an extraordinarily generous offer that Ehud…
Can’t Swallow It Anymore
On the Take: How Medicine’s Complicity With Big Business Can Endanger Your Health By Jerome P. Kassirer • Oxford University Press • 288 pages • $28.00 The $800 Million Pill: The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs By Merrill Goozner • University of California Press • 297 pages • $24.95 Powerful Medicines:…
Rights in an Insecure World
Almost as soon as the planes crashed into the twin towers, scholars, pundits, and politicians began asserting that our most important challenge as a democracy now is to reassess the balance between liberty and security. As Harvard human-rights scholar Michael Ignatieff wrote in The Financial Times on September 12, “As America awakens to the reality…
2000, The Sequel
Sam Heyward thought he’d paid his debt. A tall, soft-spoken 45-year-old man from Tallahassee, Florida, Heyward was convicted in 1981 of a felony for buying furniture he knew was stolen. He spent a year in a prison work camp and then tried to rebuild his life. He got a steady job at a Tallahassee church…
Top Gun
War and the American Presidency By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. • Norton • 224 pages • $23.95 America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism By Anatol Lieven • Oxford University Press • 304 pages • $30.00 It has become a cliché to hurl back at President George W. Bush his…
Vexations of the Heartland
What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America By Thomas Frank • Metropolitan Books • 320 PAGES• $24.00 Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts From the Heart of America By Garrison Keillor • Viking • 237 PAGES • $19.95 Few developments have changed American politics more in the…
Into the Bright Sunshine
The most obvious value of human rights to the post-Holocaust world has been to set a limit on government power and shine a light on its abuses. The limit comes from the revolutionary idea, conceived in the immediate aftermath of World War II, that all governments are constrained in their actions by the inherent dignity…
Film: Ernesto Goes to the Movies
He was, per Jean-Paul Sartre, “the most complete human being of our age.” Not to be outdone, Susan Sontag eulogized him as “the clearest, most unequivocal image of the humanity of the world-wide revolutionary struggle unfolding today.” He, of course, is Ernesto “Che” Guevara, although the key word in Sontag’s formulation is neither “humanity” nor…
Health Care’s Big Choice
The American health-care system is again at a point of critical change as a result of escalating costs and a gathering movement among employers, insurers, and policy-makers to revamp the structure of health insurance. Like the spread of managed care a decade ago, the new changes will be a bitter pill for many people. Most…
Idiot Boxed
There was plenty of humiliation to go around in the aftermath of the 2000 elections. Vote counters and ballot designers, election boards and state legislatures all came in for heavy criticism. But special ignominy was reserved for the five major broadcast and cable networks and their news operations. The networks that night broadcast multiple incorrect…
Long Division
Around about the third week of the “Swift”-boat controversy, commentators began to note, in a tone of disapproving sadness, that the firestorm created by the accusations against John Kerry proved that three decades later, the nation was still hopelessly divided over the Vietnam War. David Broder of The Washington Post kicked things off: “Will we…
Buckeye Blues
LORAIN, OHIO — The Steelworkers hall here is a musty monument to American labor’s glorious past. On the walls are photos of Franklin Roosevelt signing the Wagner Act in 1935, and of Philip Murray, president of the United Steelworkers of America from its inception in 1937 until his death in 1952. Newer images are nowhere…
The Road to Abu Ghraib
From the last, best hope of earth to Abu Ghraib: What has happened to the vision of America as the land of justice? In countless ways, at home and in the world, this country has abandoned its commitment to the protection of human rights. The change is all the more stark because Americans played such…
Iraq the Vote
The most important election in determining the future of U.S. policy in the Middle East may not be the one happening on November 2. Sometime in the 10 days after the victor takes the presidential oath of office on January 20, another election will take place in Iraq. This will determine the composition of a…
Where Are the Rational Greedy Bastards?
Why is big business so enthusiastic about another Bush term? Yes, corporations have gotten a few fat tax breaks and regulatory rollbacks, and more face time with the president than do White House security guards. But on the issues that count, the current administration and its allies are undermining the foundations of American business. Consider…
Now for Some Bad News
Read my lips: I’ll raise your taxes — a lot. Thus, paraphrased only slightly, speaks George W. Bush to Middle America. Yet many of his intended middle-class victims don’t seem to hold it against him. Or perhaps they haven’t been listening hard enough. In his speech at the Republican convention, Bush called for a “simpler,…
The A-Team
Unless you spent the summer orbiting with the Genesis space capsule, you know that John Kerry had a lousy August and a brutal early September. Thanks to the attacks of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the masterfully orchestrated Republican national convention — aided and abetted by the right-wing media’s power to keep stories…
Prospects: George W. and Human Rights
George Washington set a standard that our current president disregards.
