Special Report

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]