(Originally posted on Huffington Post.)
When most of us think about lack of access to water among the poor, we’re more likely to envision people in third-world countries — victims of drought, famine or polluted rivers — rather than our neighbors here in the United States. After all, water is a necessity [...]
Tuesday night, almost 600 New Yorkers came out to hear a diverse line-up of writers, artists, a former CIA agent and former military interrogator reading from pages of documents that detail the Bush administration’s torture program.
We teamed up with PEN American Center to present Reckoning with Torture: Memos and Testimonies from the “War on Terror.” [...]
The U.S. is the world’s leading incarcerator with over 2.3 million people – or 1 in 99 adults – in prisons and jails across the country. Our incarceration rate of 760 per 100,000 people is the highest in the world — five to ten times that of other Western democracies. In addition, because of [...]
Tomorrow marks World Day Against the Death Penalty, and it is only fitting that a global call was issued to abolish the practice. We join the ambassadors of the European Union (EU) who gathered today to call on all nations to abolish the cruel practice.
Ambassador John Bruton, the head of EU delegation to the U.S., [...]
In a letter to the Obama administration made public today, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) expressed concerns over a lack of progress to end racial discrimination in the United States. In particular, the letter urged the Obama administration and Congress to do more to end racial profiling, like [...]
We’ve just learned that the House and Senate conferees approved language today for the homeland security appropriations bill that, if passed, would grant the Department of Defense (DoD) the authority to continue suppressing photos depicting the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody overseas.
Since 2003, the ACLU has been seeking photos and records related to the [...]
Nearly four years have passed since I first traveled to Guantánamo to observe proceedings in the military commission prosecution of Canadian Omar Khadr, who was 15 years old when seized in Afghanistan and has now spent fully a third of his life in captivity. In an ordinary justice system, Khadr’s trial – and very [...]
This week, on Thursday, October 8th from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m., human rights lawyers and advocates will gather to discuss the importance of a human rights framework to protect the rights of those deprived of their liberty.
This special event features Sir Nigel Rodley, whose book, The Treatment of Prisoners Under International Law, was just published [...]
In his continuing effort to bring to light human rights issues in the United States before an international stage, Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU Human Rights Program, made a statement about the capital punishment system at the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting (HDIM) of the Organization for Security and [...]
So much of what human rights advocates do is try to make the invisible visible. The more marginal and vulnerable the victims and the more remote the geographic location, the harder it is to do.
That, in a nutshell, is the goal and challenge of the San Diego ACLU’s report on border [...]