Janine Jackson interviewed the ACLU’s Jamil Dakwar about human rights and the United States for the November 10, 2023,  episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

 

Janine Jackson: As US officials and pundits appear to consider which babies are really civilians and which interpretation of law allows for their murder, you can almost imagine them thinking that the world is watching, waiting to learn: What do these smart people think about geopolitics? What will they decide?”

When certainly, what a huge number of people are thinking, around the world and in this country, is: Where do they get off? What allows so many US professional talking–type people, in 2023, to imagine that they are the city on the hill?

The belief in US exceptionalism—the idea that this country alone can and should serve as international arbiter, not because of a massive military and a readiness to use it, but because of the impenetrable moral high ground earned by a commitment to democratic principles—well, that belief is price of admission to the “serious people” foreign policy conversations in the US press.

So something like the recent report from the UN Human Rights Committee, that assesses the US the same way it would assess any other country on human rights issues, lands in corporate US news media like a message from Mars.

Joining us now with a differing context is Jamil Dakwar, director of the Human Rights Program at the ACLU. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jamil Dakwar.

Jamil Dakwar: Thank you for having me on.

JJ: This assessment from the UN Human Rights Committee can be read as particularly meaningful at the moment, as the United States asserts, both openly and covertly, its power in the Middle East. But the report is about

many things, both international and here in the United States. I know that people are not going to see a lot—if any—of media coverage on this report. So what is the report, and then what’s in it that we should acknowledge?

JD: The report that was released last Friday, November 3, is the result or outcome of a review that happened last month, on the 17 and 18 of October, by the UN Human Rights Committee. This is a committee of independent experts, of about 18 members, that come from different parts of the world, and they are in charge of monitoring the implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

This treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights—or the ICCPR, as it’s commonly referred to—was one of the first international human rights treaties that the United States ratified in the early 1990s, right after the end of the Cold War, when the United States was showing that, look, we are, as you said, we are the city on the hill. We are the beacon of freedom of democracy and human rights for all other countries, and we are going to be committed to these things by signing on and ratifying this treaty.

However, that was 30 years ago, and we have this report, which was issued by the independent experts of the UN Human Rights Committee, based on reviewing the United States Periodic Report that was submitted in 2021, that essentially concluded that the US has so much more work to do. It has fallen behind, and it’s actually an outlier in many areas when it comes to civil and political rights, and particularly with regard to marginalized communities.

This is a really damning report. This is a report that—a review happens every eight or nine years. The last time this happened was in 2014, during the Obama administration. The United States’ report itself, to the committee, was submitted in the last five days of the Trump administration, and the Biden administration showed up before the committee.

Although they attempted to show some of the work and some of the important steps that they took in order to address some of the backsliding on human rights that happened in the last eight years, the committee was not convinced. And in specific terms, it went one by one, and in the report, which I hope you can post it also on your website, is a very long document that covers a massive amount of issues, from Indigenous rights to reproductive rights, to voting rights, to issues related to free speech and assembly rights, use of force. The criminal legal system was also analyzed in the report, looking at specific extreme sentences and punishment, like death by incarceration, for example, and many, many other issues that, really, it’s hard to enumerate in just a short interview.

But the bottom line is, this was another wake-up call for the United States, that you really cannot claim the moral high ground. You cannot preach to other countries on human rights when you are not doing enough here at home in your own backyard.

And I think civil society organizations that participated in the review—and we had over 140 of them from the United States, all the way from the colonial territories of Guam to Puerto Rico, to Alaska, Hawaii, to different parts of the United States—and the civil society organizations have made it clear that they are not going to accept the same talking points or the same formulations that government officials from the State Department, from the White House, from the Justice Department have put forward to the committee.

They are inadequate. More needs to be done. And that’s something that I think was echoed by the recommendations that were made in the report of the Human Rights Committee.

JJ: I do think that a lot of folks will actually find it jarring to hear the term “human rights” applied in a US domestic context. Human rights is something that other countries have violations of, and the idea of looking at missing and murdered Indigenous girls, at the death penalty, at asylum policy, at solitary confinement, looking at those as human rights issues, I think is just difficult for many people.

And I don’t want it to get lost; there is a call to action. There are calls to action suggested by the report. So what are they saying should actually happen right now?

JD: First, the committee said, we are not happy and we’re not satisfied with the way that the United States has been implementing—or rather, failing to implement—the treaty at the state, local and federal level. So they first expressed that concern, and they also said that we don’t accept the reservations that the United States has entered when the US ratified it.

But more importantly, they said the United States doesn’t have a human rights infrastructure to implement international human rights obligations. And they called, as a matter of a priority, to establish a national human rights institution—which many countries around the world, including the closest US Western allies, have—where this body would be in charge of implementing and monitoring and helping the United States uphold its international human rights obligations and commitments at the federal, state and local level.

We don’t have such a body. In fact, we don’t have any monitoring body which relates to human rights, and therefore this was one of the first and, I think, a prominent recommendation that is in the report.

The committee also made significant detailed recommendations, going through the list from, as you said, Indigenous rights issues related to sacred sites and tribal lands, or land where there was not adequate consultations with Indigenous communities—and asked them to uphold the principle of free prior and informed consent, which is a universal principle accepted by many countries around the world when it comes to intrusion and violating the rights of Indigenous peoples, particularly in the extraction and development industry.

The other area that was very prominent was in the area of gender equality and reproductive rights, where the committee also noted and called for significant changes in the way that the United States government is upholding its international human rights obligations with relation to protecting women’s right to choose and women’s right to their own body, to domestic violence, and the fact that this is an endemic that has really reached the highest proportion.

It also addressed the issue of migration and rights of immigrants, including in immigration detention facilities, the fact that many people are losing their right to seek asylum, something that we’ve seen deteriorating even under the Biden administration.

It called on the United States to look at the impact of the climate crisis on human rights in the United States, something that usually is not looked at as a matter of human rights, rather as a matter of environmental rights, or only as a matter of a climate crisis separate from human rights.

It also called on the US to address voting rights as a really urgent issue, where we know, and the committee noted, the gerrymandering and redistricting that was happening around the country, the suppression of voter rights, particularly of minority and marginalized communities.

So all of those are in the report. They are calling on the United States within three years to submit a progress report on what [steps] will be taken in order to address issues of immigration, reproductive rights and voting rights. And then, in eight years, the US will be up for another review.

Of course, the US shouldn’t be waiting for eight years to start working on its own record. I think that’s where our role as civil society organizations, to hold our government accountable, to make sure that they are doing what they should do, what they should have done yesterday or years ago and in an urgent manner.

Because it’s really impacted not only people in the United States. Some of the policies impact millions of people who reside outside the United States, particularly with regard to US massive surveillance policies. The impact of the United States’ policies of foreign assistance, as we know, impacts the rights of people who live outside the United States, including people who are still held at places like Guantánamo Bay, where the committee expressed deep concern that the Guantánamo Bay detention facility is still open and the kangaroo courts of military commissions are still hearing accusations and capital charges against some of the individuals held there.

So the call for action is clear. I think now it’s up to the US government at all levels to take that seriously, and I think for us as civil society organizations and the media to hold the government accountable as to the progress that should be made in the next few years, in terms of where the US will find itself. Is it going to really live up to this self-defined title of a global leader on human rights and champion of universal human rights? Or it’s going to continue to be only talk, and no action that will follow.

JJ: I just did want to add, finally, that just because corporate news media deal in crudeness doesn’t mean that people aren’t capable of holding ambiguity, of both seeing that their government has undeserved power and also caring about the way that that power is deployed.

And I guess one of the things I’m maddest about is the way that corporate media conflate what they call “US interests” with those of the American people. And I know that people are deeper than that, are smarter than that. And so media are not just underserving us, but erasing many of us, and the complexity and the depth of understanding that we’re capable of having when it comes to the US role in the world.

JD: Absolutely. I think that is an important distinction to be made. And I think that based on polling, most people in the United States understand the importance of human rights, actually understand also the importance of the role of international human rights bodies, including the bodies like the UN Human Rights Committee and the role of the United Nations.

And yet there is an organized, orchestrated attack to delegitimize the human rights movement in different ways. The lack of any concerted effort to do human rights education in the United States is clear, and there’s the whole movement to do censorship in the classroom, to block the ability of students to learn about history such as slavery or genocide of Indigenous peoples, or about the rights of the LGBTQ community, and so on.

So there’s a serious organized, ideologically driven movement against any progress that this country has made over the years, and I think that there is a responsibility for all people in this country to take that seriously, meaning to push back against those efforts.

And I think the UN human rights bodies really can do much in order to really flag the concerns and the urgency and the disparities and the gaps between international human rights norms and standards and US policies and practices. And it’s really up to the people to organize and to do what they need to do in order to hold their government officials accountable.

And there is some work happening at the state and local level. When we were in Geneva last month, we had the head of the Missouri Human Rights Commission, Alisa Warren, who is also the president of IAOHRA, the International Association of Official Human Rights Agencies, that is coordinating the work of state and local human rights commissions. These agencies told the US government, “You should support us, you should provide incentives and guide us and help us do this work on the state and local level.”

And so there’s so much energy, there’s so much out there that needs to be done, and I think there’s only a hope that there should be the right political capital spent on this, rather than spent on other issues, or distorting the ideals of human rights and the notion that these really start at the very local community level.

And if we don’t do that now, it will be too late, because this is going to impact the way our future generation of people living in this country will be having a much worse situation, in terms of their ability to enjoy all of their human rights, not just civil and political rights, as this particular treaty was on, but also social, economic, cultural rights, which are the other part where the United States is falling behind in recognizing and respecting as a matter of constitutional framework, as a matter of law, as a matter of  decent treatment of all human beings.

JJ: Thank you very much. We’ve been speaking with Jamil Dakwar. He’s director of the Human Rights Program at the ACLU. Thank you again, Jamil Dakwar, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JD: Thank you for this opportunity.

 

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