By Chandra Bhatnagar, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Human Rights Program at 7:07pm
A White House task force set up to combat human trafficking held its annual meeting today, chaired by Secretary of State John Kerry. The cabinet-level group, called the President's Interagency Task Force to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (PITF) coordinates the U.S. government's efforts to eradicate the phenomenon commonly likened to "modern-day slavery."
By Zachary Katznelson, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 9:30am
The hunger strike in Guantánamo is now in its fourth month. At the military’s latest count, 100 of the 166 prisoners are on strike, motivated in large part by their indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial. Twenty-nine of those men are being force-fed, the largest number yet during this hunger strike. Force-feeding in Guantánamo is a brutal, degrading experience.
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.
By Noa Yachot, Communications Strategist, ACLU at 2:31pm
A detailed and harrowing first-person narrative of a prisoner's experiences in Guantánamo is available to the public for the first time: Slate today published a three-part series of excerpts from The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. The excerpts were culled from a manuscript hundreds of pages in length, which Slahi provided his attorneys, a pro bono team of ACLU and other lawyers. After being classified for years, Slahi's memoirs – of arrest, rendition, torture, and imprisonment without charge or trial – are finally seeing the light of day, albeit with some redactions.
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."
