History of Human Rights in the U.S.

A Brief History of Human Rights

in the United States

It does not lessen our fidelity to the Constitution…to acknowledge that the express affirmation of certain fundamental rights by other nations and peoples simply underscores the centrality of those rights within our own heritage of freedom.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy

The idea of “bringing human rights home” was not always as novel at it appears to be today. In the 1940s and 50s domestic civil rights leaders played an active role in the creation of the United Nations and the articulation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The NAACP was one of the first organizations in the world to use the UN Human Rights Commission to raise issues of domestic race discrimination and to incorporate international legal claims into domestic litigation. The civil rights community saw human rights as a way to invoke higher standards of non-discrimination that those available under US law. They also saw human rights as a way to move beyond due process and voting rights to include the pervasive poverty, ill health, and sub-standard education that were (and still are) devastating the black community.

U.S. Pioneering and Withdrawal

The United States initially played a decisive role in establishing the UN Human Rights Commission. But its leadership foundered on the politics of the Cold War and the Jim Crow South. Unwilling to have its domestic rights record aired in increasingly polarized international bodies, and faced with insurrection from southern Senators determined to protect segregation, the United States simply stopped upholding its responsibilities under international treaties and mechanisms. It was roughly another thirty years, for example, before the United States would even ratify the Genocide Convention. Civil rights activists who sought to invoke human rights were condemned as traitorous or worse.

Civil Rights at Home, Human Rights Abroad

From the 1950s until the late 1990s, we inhabited this bi-furcated rights reality in the United States. Human rights applied elsewhere and only civil rights applied here. This is not to suggest that the United States government or groups refrained altogether from engagement with the international human rights or humanitarian law systems. To the contrary, the United States often played an extremely positive human rights role in the world, favoring, for example, the global prohibition on torture, the recognition and protection of the human rights of women and children, and the articulation of the Refugee and Geneva Conventions.

Courageous Opposition

Similarly, US-based international advocacy groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA, held the US government’s feet to the fire in terms of the protection and promotion of human rights worldwide, denouncing US complicity in human rights abuse by foreign governments and invoking US leadership to oppose gross violations of human rights, including torture in detention, extra-judicial executions, political imprisonment and the targeting of civilians in wartime. Even as US human rights leadership in the world grew, however, a stark double standard began to emerge: what the United States was willing to promote abroad it was unwilling to apply at home.

A Tarnished Reputation

The effects of this double standard were profound in terms both of US relations with the rest of the world and the enjoyment of rights in this country. With respect to the former, the US government’s persistent unwillingness to practice what it preached with respect to human rights compromised its leadership globally, alienated potential allies and angered likely enemies. The effects at home were no less debilitating. By shielding itself from most meaningful accountability to international law, the United States too often denied Americans (or those in their custody) the human rights and humanitarian law protections which are due to every human being. Where the Constitution or domestic law fell short, affected groups like immigrants, prisoners, racial and sexual minorities, and those living in poverty had little or no alternative recourse. Domestic rights activism in these areas still flourished, but with one hidden cost: it lacked any appeal to rights based solely on one’s humanity and to remedies beyond those available domestically.

Rejoining Human Rights

At the end of the 20th century, the default understanding of human rights as foreign and civil rights as domestic began to change. Domestic rights advocates and their supporters began to view human rights as an effective way to supplement existing legal and advocacy strategies, to foster greater unity among often fractured social justice communities, to bring new and younger voices to progressive activities, and to re-engage with the global human rights movement.

US-based international human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch, Global Rights, and Human Rights First now have US programs and growing relationships with domestic social justice groups. National rights organizations with state and local counterparts, like the ACLU and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, increasingly see human rights as a dimension of their own work, rather than something carried out by other organizations focused abroad. An increasing number of domestic groups have arisen -- like the Montana Human Rights Committee, Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, or the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights -- which frame and carry out their US work wholly in terms of human rights. All of these groups are gradually finding ways to come together through networks such as US Human Rights Network and the Rights Working Group. A US human rights movement has clearly begun to emerge.

The Need for the Fund

Launched on July 4, 2005, the U.S. Human Rights Fund arose out of these developments. It aims to strategically respond to renewed domestic interest in human rights with an emphasis on capacity building, networking, communications and strategic thought and advocacy. Its overall mission is to promote the full realization of human rights in the United States and to help restore US human rights leadership at home and in the wider world.

Prepared by Dorothy Q. Thomas