By Matthew Harwood, Media Relations Associate, ACLU at 5:41pm
When former White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan went before the Senate in early February for his confirmation hearing to lead the CIA, he made a startling admission. After reading the 300-page summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's (SSCI) mammoth 6,000-page report on the CIA's post-9/11 detention and interrogation program, Brennan's belief in the life-saving value of the torture program was shaken.
By Ian Kysel, Aryeh Neier Fellow, ACLU Human Rights Program at 5:07pm
There are more than 80,000 people in solitary confinement in the United States. Last week, the widespread misuse and abuse of solitary confinement in jails and prisons across the country drew international condemnation when the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights criticized the United States following weeks of hearings on human rights practices across the Americas region.
An international human rights body is set to question the United States on its obligations under a key human rights treaty. The U.N. Human Rights Committee, an independent body of experts tasked with monitoring compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), this week released its list of issues, which will serve as the basis for its upcoming review of U.S. compliance with the treaty. The U.S. ratified the ICCPR in 1992 and is obligated to submit to periodic reviews of its treaty implementation efforts.
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.”
U.S. officials have acknowledged that human trafficking is a problem of "crisis proportions," both outside and inside America's borders. Yet despite professed intent to end this scourge, including with the help of a "zero-tolerance, one strike approach," human trafficking remains a pervasive and ongoing problem in this nation. As part of ongoing efforts to combat the phenomenon, the ACLU and a coalition of anti-trafficking organizations submitted a written statement last week to the Federal Acquisition Regulatory (FAR) Council, urging the U.S. government to translate its words into actions.
By Alexander Abdo, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 10:23am
Update (5/7/2013): CIA Director John Brennan has replaced the acting head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, who is also the subject of this blog post. This important news hopefully signals Brennan’s commitment to enforcing the letter and spirit of President Obama's executive order banning the use of torture, abuse, and secret prisons.
Today, the United Nations and the world celebrate 30 years of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the international human rights treaty dedicated to gender equality, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 18, 1979.
On December 16, 2010, West High School officials in Salt Lake City, Utah invited the Metro Gang Task Force into the school to conduct a gang sweep. Students identified, searched and interrogated by the police were mostly Latino/a or, in the case of Kaleb Winston, African-American. He was targeted by his school and by the Task Force as a potential gang member, searched and accused of being a tagger. As an artist, Kaleb had a notebook full of drawings in a backpack manufactured to look like it had been spray-painted. But because graffiti is loosely defined, if at all, the police decided Kaleb was a “gang tagger” despite his denials. Kaleb was then forced to hold up a sign with the words “My name is Kaleb Winston and I am a gang tagger.” Law enforcement officers told him that this information was being placed into a database and that the information would be removed if he did not get into trouble for two years. Kaleb was emotionally devastated by the experience. He is not and has never been in a gang. Yet, his attendance at school that day, not bad behavior, made him the subject of intense police scrutiny and he now lives with the fear that the police view him as a suspect.
