U.S. HUMAN RIGHTS NETWORK
POLITICAL PRISONERS/STATE REPRESSION WORKING GROUP


The Obama Administration is holding meetings to prepare its list of accepted recommendations from governments at its 11/5/11 Geneva appearance. We must keep Cuba's PP recommendation in the U.S. list of human rights concerns. This group is working towards building a firestorm for US Political Prisoners in preparation of the US's March 18th return to Geneva.

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Monday, March 21, 2011

Oral Statement Regarding the Adoption of the UPR Report on the USA

Oral Statement Regarding the Adoption of the UPR Report on the USA
US Human Rights Network
www.ushrnetwork.org

Oral Statement Regarding the Adoption of the UPR Report on the USA

Submitted by lbaum on Fri, 03/18/2011 - 12:39pm

• Adoption
• Joint Statement
• UPR

On behalf of the US Human Rights Network, a network of civil society organizations and advocates from across the United States committed to the advancement of human rights for all across the United States

Mr President, we acknowledge the US government’s unprecedented level of civil society engagement throughout the UPR. That engagement could and should serve as a model for how civil society and governments can engage effectively in the UPR process. However, it is critical that the UPR be about more than just process – we call on the Administration to take concrete action to implement the recommendations included in the UPR Report, recommendations that reflect long-standing calls for action from civil society within the United States and indeed from the international community.

Mr. President, we are aware of the US administration’s desire to assert its moral and political leadership in the area of human rights enforcement. Human rights leadership on the State level is critically needed as we collectively face the upheavals of the early 21st century. However, State leadership in the area of human rights suggests that a state has acted or continues to act based on a consistent commitment to upholding international norms and standards in its domestic policies and international conduct. Based on that simple supposition, the US cannot can claim for itself exclusive leadership in the area of human rights, nor can any other state.

For the US to assert leadership it must banish to the dustbins of history its claim for US “exceptionalism” that is based on a national narrative that is more myth than reality.

There is nothing exceptional about the fact that the US has not ratified most of the core human rights instruments and continues to embrace reservations, understandings and declarations in the few treaties that it has ratified.

There is nothing exceptional about the fact that in these times of economic crisis, when millions of US citizens and residents are unemployed, lack adequate housing, are hungry, are still without affordable or accessible health care or equally funded education, and when workers are demanding the basic right to organize and collectively bargain; the US administration continues to reject economic, social and cultural rights as human rights, and as such, fails to take responsibility for its affirmative obligations to develop a plan of action aimed at the fulfillment of those rights.

There is nothing exceptional that 60 years after the landmark court decision in 1954 that began the era of dismantling the US Apartheid system - Black unemployment rates among youth are 40, 50, and even 60 precent in some urban areas; that Black, Latino and Native people make up the vast majority of the over two million individuals incarcerated in the world largest penal system. And when they are not being imprisoned, Black and Brown youth are being illegally killed by police across the country.

There is nothing exceptional about the fact that the demands for effective self-determination on the part of indigenous people in the continental US, Hawaii and Alaska are continually ignored by successive administrations, and that Puerto Rico continues to languish in political limbo

There is nothing exceptional about the fact that despite its high-sounding commitment to due process, fair trials and justice, the US administration indefinitely detains, without charge or effective access to justice, dozens of people at its Guantanamo gulag, joining the over 100 Black, Latino, Native and anti-racist White political prisoners still languishing in the inhumane conditions of super-max prisons in the US.

Mr President, while the US government will argue that it has limited ability to address many of the 228 recommendations received from this body, we suggest two concrete things that are within its ability to either implement or advocate for:

• an internal mechanism in the Executive Branch to educate, coordinate and monitor human rights compliance among federal agencies, in the form of an interagency task force;
• the establishment of a national human rights institution, as recommended by many states;
• a permanent mechanism for engaging representatives from US civil society in human rights accountability structures and the development of national plans of action.

Freed from its national self-delusions and committed to objective principles and agreed-on international norms, the US can play a critical role in the ongoing struggle for a new conception and practice of human rights.

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