Report To Department Of State And United Nations Challenging U.S. Human Rights Violations Since 9/11 Presented At UN Church Center, March 31

February 22, 2005. New York. “Challenging U.S. Human Rights Violations Since 9/11,” a comprehensive report to the U.S. State Department and to the UN Human Rights Committee, will be presented by Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute on Thursday, March 31, from 1 to 2 p.m. at the Church Center for the United Nations Conference Room (across from the UN Building).

The Report will be introduced by Prof. Ann Fagan Ginger, who edited the Report for the Meiklejohn Institute, a center for human rights and peace law in Berkeley, California since 1965. Representatives of Gold Star Families, Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, National Lawyers Guild, Center for Constitutional Rights, Unitarian Universalist UN Office, United Nations Association and many others will be present to talk briefly about the violations they are challenging.

Ginger says “The 180 reports include torture at Abu Ghraib, detentions at Guantanamo, the undeclared wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, cutting funding to schools in low income neighborhoods, arrests at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, using Taft-Hartley injunctions against strikers, racial profiling and job discrimination, keeping thousands of nuclear bombs on trigger alert, forcing noncitizens out of jobs and then deporting them, threatening the right to choose and family-planning funding, failing to insure that all voters can vote and all votes are counted fairly, and 166 other issues.”

The report will be published as a paperback book by Prometheus Books on March 30.

“The Report is being presented to the U.S. State Department to use in the preparation of its very tardy reports to the UN Human Rights Committee, the UN Committee Against Torture, and the UN Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination.”

Ginger says MCLI is qualified to make the report based on its legal and educational work from the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the ’60s to its workshops at the Beijing Conference on the Status of Women in Beijing in 1995 and the World Conference Against Racism in Durban just before 9/11. Meiklejohn Institute presented a shadow report to the State Department and the UN Human Rights Committee when the U.S. made its first report to the Committee in 1995. Ginger herself won a case in the U.S. Supreme Court (8-0) in the McCarthy period of 1959 against the Ohio UnAmerican Activities Committee.

“We decided to list in this Report all of the relevant habeas corpus and treaty provisions in the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Civil Rights Amendments, and the very timely but less-well-known UN Charter human rights and no-war provisions, the living Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg Principles, and the relevant articles in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. We put the full text of the relevant laws in Chapter 6 for easy reference.”

Howard Zinn says “This is an immensely valuable book for all Americans concerned about their constitutional rights in the midst of a supposed ‘war on terrorism.’ Ann Fagan Ginger has pulled together a shocking compendium of human rights violations, and at the same time has given us practical tools, legal and political, for defending our liberties.”

The presentation will be co-sponsored by Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute and the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy in the 2d floor Conference room of the Church Center for the United Nations at 777 UN Plaza (at East. 44th St.).

Ginger will describe new paths for action proposed for lawyers, civil rights and peace activists, students, union members, and the faith-based communities. One is through filing many more complaints with the Office of Inspector General in each of the relevant U.S. Government agencies in each region of the U.S. One is through proposing resolutions to city councils and state legislatures. One is through litigation. One is through making reports to UN committees and publicizing them world-wide. “It helped in South Africa and East Timor,” Ginger says. “Why not try it in New York and Ohio?”

“And, on the upbeat side, the Report includes the text of 11 resolutions and ordinances passed by cities and states -- against the war in Iraq, against the PATRIOT Act, against corporate personhood, for elector reform, etc.”

See also Table of Contents of the “Challenging” book.