05 May Looking for New and Innovative Ways to Implement U.S. Human Rights Treaties
I hadn’t been aware of this group, Human Rights at Home, which is seeking to “create a national political culture that supports and advocates for human rights.” In fact, they have some interesting ideas of how to reform U.S. legal infrastructure to implement U.S. international human rights obligations.
- revitalizing an Interagency Working Group on Human Rights to coordinate the efforts of the executive departments and agencies both to promote and respect human rights and to implement human rights obligations in U.S. domestic policy;
- transforming the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights into a U.S. Commission on Civil and Human Rights, to expand its mandate to include not only civil and human rights issues, but also monitoring human rights implementation and enforcement efforts, and to make structural reforms to improve the commission’s ability to function as an independent national human rights institution;
- ensuring meaningful government compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which the U.S. ratified in 1994; and
- strengthening federal, state, and local government coordination in support of human rights.
I applaud creative thinking about how to implement U.S. treaty obligations. I am most interested in the second and fourth bullet points. The second is actually a very interesting idea, since the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights actually has relatively little direct enforcement power, but does have the power to demand information, issue reports, and generally publicize civil rights problems. It actually would be an interesting fit to add human rights to its portfolio. This elides the problem that the main treaties under its purview are non-self-executing. The last bullet point is even more interesting. Depending on how grassroots you go, state and local governments could be a central player in international human rights implementation. Certainly, the activists are right that their moment for this push is now.
Agreed. Even if the treaties are non-self-executing domestically, as a matter of political convenience it might be seen as convenient to be seen as in compliance – getting to the same place by other means.
Best,
Ben
Response.. I respectfully disagree. There are several weaknesses to the proposal, but the most serious to my mind is that it dilutes the Civil Rights Commission’s present focus on anti-discrimination policy. This is already an extraordinarily wide jurisdiction for one agency, ranging from voting procedures to special education to prison conditions to accessibility rules in residential construction. Adding domestic compliance with international human rights treaties will only fracture the attention of an agency which has already had numerous challenges, over several decades and administrations, complying with its existing mandate. Moreover, these treaties would not represent an incremental addition to this incredibly underfunded Commission’s powers but a radical change in its focus away from continuing problems of bias, hate and discrimination. A better idea, for those who share your concerns, would be to add this responsibility to the more analogous responsibilities of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board; to strengthen that oversight board, as Congress as already mandated; and to pressure the Obama administration to finally fill its seats and get the agency moving again. For other shortcomings to this proposal, see http://www.fed-soc.org/publications/pubid.1817/pub_detail.asp