HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN U.S. GOVERNMENT
TREATMENT OF KATRINA VICTIMS


What happened to the New Orleans staff of the People's Institute For Survival and Beyond after Katrina destroyed their office and they were forced to leave caused Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute and the People's Institute to submit a Report to the UN Human Rights Committee on human rights violations by the U.S. Government. The Committee enforces the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), a treaty ratified by the U.S. under the first Pres. Bush.

“The U.S. Government's lack of any enforceable evacuation plan put New Orleans residents in harm's way,” according to Daniel A. Buford, Regional Consultant for the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond. “This contributed to a mounting death toll of numerous poor people. And the refusal of FEMA to adequately care for the dead in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is an affront to human dignity, and causes terror for bereaved family members.”

"We have made a list of fifteen actions that violate the U.S. Constitution 'general welfare' clause, the right to human dignity in UN Charter Art. 55 and the Covenant; the Government's duty not to discriminate under two other ratified treaties: the Convention on Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and the duty not to use degrading treatment under the Convention Against Torture," Ann Fagan Ginger reported. "The facts come from the New Orleans Institute staff and from coverage in Democracy Now, NPR, Broncaccio's NOW, and many emails from the region."

15 TYPES OF HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS
1. Failing to continue funding work on old levies.
2. Failing to make a workable comprehensive emergency plan.
3. Deploying many National Guard troops from Gulf states to Iraq, leaving too few to serve locally.
4. Putting an incompetent head of FEMA in charge of U.S. relief work.
5. Ordering thousands of untrained government employees to the area to focus on "looters" from poor and African American communities, to flood their regions to save upscale areas, and to round them up and send them to massive coliseums.
6. Ordering citizens to evacuate by car, when thousands had no cars.
7. Imposing martial law and sending police/military to treat victims as prisoners, not displaced persons suffering severe emotional and spiritual trauma, and answering their questions by telling them to "check that with ..." some agency that could not be reached.
8. Failing to retrieve dead bodies, even when pointed out.
9. Announcing checks, rather than cash, would be sent to victim families surviving in shelters with no access to banks and bank accounts.
10. Sending people to coliseums with thousands of others, without toilets, water, food, air conditioning, blankets, or trained social workers.
11. Ordering citizens to get into buses, without being told the destination and forbidden to get off sooner.
12. Failure to immediately send available buses equipped with water, food, supplies to disaster areas.
13. Immediately announcing contracts with large, white-owned corporations not based in the Gulf to rebuild, with no local input or guarantee of jobs to locals.
14. Making threats to the media when they tried to take photos of some areas or actions by officers, and confiscation of cameras and photos.
15. Failing to carry out the mandates of the Government's 9/11 Commission, which, according to the Republican chair of that Commission, former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, and the Democrat vice-chair Lee Hamilton, former Indiana Congress member, would have helped deal with the confusion that followed Katrina.

Note: On Sept. 13, Pres. Bush made a brief admission that mistakes had been made, took responsibility for them, and removed the head of FEMA from heading the post-Katrina efforts.

Judge Claudia Morcom of the Wayne County Circuit Court in Michigan will present this report, and reports of other human rights violations by the U.S. since 9/11, to the UN Human Rights Committee on Oct. 24 in Geneva when many U.S. NonGovernmental Organizations will also be heard.

Note: Provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights allegedly violated in Government dealings with some victims of Katrina:
Preamble, Articles 2.1, 3, 4.1, 6.1, 7, 9.1, 10.1, 12.1, 17, 23.1, 24.1, 26