Blog of Rights
Katie
Haas

Katie Haas is a Legal Assistant for the ACLU’s Human Rights Program as well as its Speech, Privacy & Technology Project. Katie graduated from Yale in 2012, where she majored in history. Her senior thesis focused on human rights and transitional justice, specifically discussing the 1985 junta trial in Argentina. She won the Arthur Liman Public Interest Program’s summer fellowship in 2011, and spent that summer as a legal intern with the New York City community organization Make the Road New York. Katie was also a research assistant for Yale Law School Professor Judith Resnik and coordinated the Yale chapter of Amnesty International.

05/02/2013
United Nations

U.N. Working Group Finds That U.S. Needs to Do More to Address the Adverse Business Impacts on Human Rights

By Katie Haas, ACLU Human Rights Program at 4:45pm

The United Nations Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises yesterday completed its first country visit to the United States. The Working Group was formed by the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2011 to disseminate and implement the recently developed "Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights," which set forth countries' obligation to protect people from human rights violations caused by businesses or other entities and the necessity of appropriate remedies for such violations. The Guiding Principles also outline businesses' responsibility to respect human rights. At the invitation of the U.S. government, the Working Group visited many cities and met with diverse stakeholders including federal and state officials, businesses, trade unions, and civil society organizations.

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04/23/2013
United Nations

ACLU Advocates for Human Rights of Prisoners at UN meeting in Vienna

By Katie Haas, ACLU Human Rights Program at 4:59pm

The ACLU is in Vienna this week, at the 22nd session of the U.N. Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice. One resolution the Commission will consider concerns how to move forward with the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (SMRs) review process. The SMRs, originally adopted in 1955, have been used for decades to advocate for humane treatment of prisoners and detainees, and are, in the words of the U.S. State Department, "the most important set of guidelines" on the treatment of prisoners. International human rights law has developed a great deal since the rules were first drafted, and an updated version of the SMRs is necessary to reflect those changes. To this end, the United Nations General Assembly initiated a review process to amend and update the rules to "reflect recent advances in correctional science and best practices."

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04/12/2013
IRS

Why Won’t the IRS Deploy Basic Web Security?

By Katie Haas, ACLU Human Rights Program & Chris Soghoian, Principal Technologist and Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 10:45am

This tax season, when you visit the IRS’s website seeking tax information, can you be certain that no one else is monitoring which pages you browse?

Unfortunately, right now the answer to that question is “no.” Unlike Facebook, Twitter, Google Mail (Gmail), and virtually every bank and credit card company, the IRS, like most government agencies, does not use HTTPS for encryption and authentication on its website. If you try typing “mail.google.com” into your browser right now, you will see that the URL you end up at is actually “https://mail.google.com.” That “s” after the “http” may seem insignificant, but it means a lot. It signifies that Google is using Secure Sockets Layer encryption, or SSL, to both encrypt and authenticate its communications. When you visit google.com and you see “https” at the beginning of the address, it lets you know that your connection is secure, and that third parties – such as your internet service provider, employer, or university cannot monitor what you’re doing through the use of network interception technology.

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02/28/2013
Targeted Killings

ACLU Briefs German Parliamentarians on U.S. Targeted Killing Program

By Katie Haas, ACLU Human Rights Program at 3:37pm

In Berlin yesterday, ACLU attorney Steven Watt attended a German parliamentary hearing on human rights and counterterrorism to brief lawmakers on the U.S. targeted killing program, in which thousands of people have been killed, many far from any battlefield. The hearing was held by the Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid of the German Bundestag, the lower house of the German legislature and the German equivalent to the U.S. House of Representatives. The committee invited the ACLU; Dick Marty, member of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly who authored the landmark 2006 Council report on European participation in the CIA rendition program; Wolfgang Kaleck, attorney with the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights; and others to discuss the relationship between counterterrorism and human rights.

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02/08/2013
Border Search

ACLU Files FOIA Request for Unreleased DHS Privacy Report on Laptop Searches at the Border

By Katie Haas, ACLU Human Rights Program at 10:07am

Aiming to determine the impact of border searches on Americans’ civil liberties, the Department of Homeland Security has produced a report on its policy of combing through and sometimes confiscating travelers’ laptops, cell phones, and other electronic devices—even when there is no suspicion of wrongdoing. The report was completed sometime between October 2011 and September 2012, and last week DHS quietly posted only the executive summary on its website, without many people noticing.

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12/20/2012
U.S. Death Penalty

Executing Human Dignity: US Death Penalty System to Undergo International Scrutiny

By Katie Haas, ACLU Human Rights Program at 10:16am

The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) recently released its 2012 Year End Report, which contained some important news: the number of death sentences in the U.S. remained very close to its 2011 historic low. The 78 death sentences handed down in 2012 represented a 75 percent decline since 1996.  In addition, several states that have historically been high users of the death penalty had no new death sentences or executions, including North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia.

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12/18/2012
Solitary Confinement

Falling Behind: The Human Rights Implications of Solitary Confinement in the United States

By Katie Haas, ACLU Human Rights Program at 9:45am

Last week, the world celebrated International Human Rights Day, marking the 64th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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12/10/2012
Universal Human Rights

Making Human Rights Reality

By Katie Haas, ACLU Human Rights Program at 12:07pm

Today is Human Rights Day and the 64th anniversary of the United Nations’ adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As one of the first documents to present the world with a comprehensive vision of human rights, the declaration is fundamental to the work of social justice movements around the world, and to our work at the ACLU. It lays out universal standards for human dignity that all nations should uphold, and its almost unanimous adoption by the General Assembly in 1948 was a landmark moment for human rights defenders everywhere.

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09/07/2012
Juvenile Life Without Parole

Seeking a Second Chance: Children Sentenced to Life Without Parole Seek Justice Before International Tribunal

By Allison Frankel, ACLU Human Rights Program & Katie Haas, ACLU Human Rights Program at 12:47pm

By her thirteenth birthday, Barbara Hernandez had lived with an abusive, alcoholic father and been molested by her mother’s second husband.  At fifteen, Barbara dropped out of school and moved in with her boyfriend James, who beat her and coerced her into prostitution. Barbara’s life with James had taught her that she had two choices: obey him or face physical abuse.  So when James instructed her to buy him a knife and lure a man into their home, Barbara obeyed.  While she was in another room, James stabbed the man to death.  Despite Barbara’s youth, troubled background, and the fact that she did not physically commit the crime, Barbara was tried as if she were an adult and received the harshest sentence possible in the State of Michigan, life without the possibility of parole.  She was just sixteen, and about to spend the rest of her life in prison.  In Barbara’s words, she was sentenced to a “long slow death.”

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