New Report Profiles ACLU Successes in Limiting Racial Profiling and Combatting Violence Against Women

On Monday, the Human Rights Fund (HRF) celebrated the release of Perfecting Our Union: Human Rights Success Stories Across the United States (PDF), a report that profiles how groups like the ACLU have used international human rights standards and strategies to improve people’s lives in this country.

The report profiles how the ACLU’s Human Rights Program worked with the Border Network for Human Rights (BNHR) to make the U.N. Human Rights Committee aware of the problems of racial profiling and harassment of people who live in the Texas-Mexico border region and the overall militarization of the border. Residents of that region were the targets of Operation Linebacker, a federally financed law enforcement program meant to target violent crime and drug trafficking at the border. But instead of arresting drug runners, the initiative ended up ethnically profiling brown-skinned people.

(The ACLU and BNHR (PDF) detailed these abuses, and many others, in shadow reports submitted to the U.N. on the occasion of a 2006 review of U.S. compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a treaty this country ratified in 1992.)

As a result of the ACLU and BNHR’s advocacy to the U.N.,

The drumbeat of local coverage put pressure on the mayor and legislators in Austin, the state capital, to rethink support for the policing initiative, which was later de-funded.

Perfecting Our Union also tells the story of the Jessica Gonzales. In 1999, Gonzales’s estranged husband Simon kidnapped their three daughters—over the course of 10 hours, Jessica’s desperate pleas for help to the Castle Rock police in Colorado went unheeded. After a shootout between police and Simon, her three daughters and husband were dead. It’s not known if her daughters died in the shootout, or at their father’s hand. Gonzales sued the City of Castle Rock for its failure to enforce a protection order against her husband. After several losses and a few wins, she took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, where she lost.

After the U.S. courts failed her, Gonzales, with the help of the ACLU and Columbia University’s Human Rights Clinic, petitioned the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR) to hear her case. We still await a decision, but in the meantime, the report points out Gonzales’s case before the IACHR has brought international attention to the problem of domestic violence in this country, and has given advocates for domestic violence survivors hope that an international forum will be receptive to claims when domestic courts have failed them.

This report is filled with inspiring stories like these, covering a broad array of issues including workers’ rights, education and prison policy. Be sure to check out the full report here (PDF).