Social Issues

Abstract

The detention and interrogation policies adopted by the United State's government in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks have raised several questions about its commitment to international law and human rights. Initially a bipartisan issue, the instances of torture and prisoner abuse brought before the public were condemned by both Democrats and Republicans, and both party's presidential candidates promised to shut down the illegal prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Likewise, with the exception of foreign government officials who participated in the Central Intelligence Agency's “extraordinary rendition” program, much of the international community has called on the U.S. government to comply with its treaty obligations.

This page contains a list of resources that should help you to start finding the information you need to advance your cause. Hopefully, you will find that this page strikes a delicate balance between too much and too little information. If you cannot find what you are looking for, you can email Amelie at davis.amelie@gmail.com for more help with your search.

Meeting with an official or her staff can be an enriching and fruitful experience. It can also be intimidating, so we offer the following guidelines to help you to achieve the most in your meeting. Most importantly, you should be concise but knowledgeable on your issue, and you should be respectful and courteous to the politician or staff member you meet with.

Although they don't always realize it, deep down your elected officials really appreciate your input. Even the ones who refuse to admit this cannot deny that they occasionally need your input to help them make a smart decision. Admittedly, they're usually more interested in appeasing the powerful corporate lobbies in their district than they are in you or me, but persistence and dedication can still yield results. As much as the lobbyists would like to cut us out of the process, the people do still hold some power in the electoral process. Perhaps your most valuable tool is your access to their constituents. By actively engaging with other voters in your district you are acting as a direct link between your legislator and the people she needs to appease to retain her power. This is where those alliances you made earlier on yield their dividends. The following guidelines should help you to maximize this leverage.

Before you start lobbying the government, you should probably know a little bit about how it works. This knowledge will help you understand how your issue has evolved, and it will help you identify which government officials you should focus your efforts on. Unfortunately, neither of us possesses enough knowledge of political science to describe in detail the government of any nation other than the United States. To the extent that the structure of the U.S. government draws on older systems (e.g. the Roman republic or many of the articles of the Magna Carta), it can offer insight into other forms of government. Most of the information here, however, is only useful to citizens of the United States.

Most of the social issues we face seem overwhelming when considered all at once. One of the most frequently asked questions when people learn of an injustice or a failed policy is some variation of "What can I, as just one person, do about it?". As the respected human rights and social justice advocate Noam Chomsky has indicated, the answer to this question is not so much unknown as it is unpopular. You can do a great deal about an issue, but you need to start at the beginning and work forward slowly. Your actions on an issue should be driven by a thoughtful and careful examination of the available information, which in turn may have been initiated by an emotional reaction to an upsetting policy. While a strong emotion provides you with a good incentive to start working on an issue, you must be diligent about fueling your passion with knowledge as you proceed. As you learn more about an issue that is important to you, your reason and emotion should begin to work in concert, and this authentic blending of passion and reason is much more likely to convince others to consider your position than either would alone. Admittedly, balancing these two forces can be much more difficult than expected in many cases. Outrage and anger may very well be the natural reaction to what you learn, but you must not allow your anger to short-circuit your compassion. By forcing yourself to sit down and calmly study the issue, you will learn to channel your anger into productive (and rather creative) endeavors and will therefore accomplish much more than you would with a more impulsive approach.

Public concerns continue to vie with private interests for control of policy and legislation in the United States. While general global trends toward democracy leave some room for optimism (as do the first few Executive Orders to come from the new administration in the White House), the degree to which lobbying and campaign contributions dictate government policies ensures that public issues such as environmental sustainability and social justice will continue to be trumped by the economic interests of a wealthy minority. The mainstream media, operated by the same corporate interests that dictate policy, rarely encourages public engagement in civic issues, and instead inundates viewers with sensationalized reports of crime and terror that serve only to heighten the general paranoia and distrust of one-another. Meanwhile, the media fail to take note of the critical decisions our elected leaders are quietly making based on corporate interests without any input, oversight or feedback from the people that these elected officials are purportedly serving. If public interests are to compete with commercial interests in the political arena, then the people must learn to use the resources available to allow them to engage in the political process and to organize mass struggle. The objective of this online tutorial is to provide individuals with the basic information needed to lobby in the political arena.

This is a brief account of the prominent international treaties pertaining to human rights1 and some of their predecessors in various instances of domestic law. What most intellectuals and politicians in the European tradition (including the US2 and its other colonial progeny) consider the principle affirmation of global human rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was ratified in the United Nations in 1948, 3 years after Germany's unconditional surrender.

1. 1. My formal education is in landscape ecology, and rarely involved international law. Like Noam Chomsky, my knowledge of international law is derived largely from from personal study (although I could hardly claim to be as knowledgeable as Chomsky). I have also done some volunteer work with Amnesty International, but that was primarily centered on US violations of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture, etcetera. As I learn more through feedback from users or personal experience, I will expand on what is here. Feel free to suggest additions or revisions.
2. 2. Although it was heavily involved in the development of the United Nations, the "political consensus" in the United States has become increasingly hostile to the international body. Chomsky's observation that this is related to the democratization of the UN and the decline of the US government's hegemony over the body fits with timing and nature of this trend. In any case, although the US government purports to agree with and uphold the Universal Declaration as the de facto standard, it routinely fails to uphold---or actively undermines---what is actually stated in the Universal Declaration. Although hardly unique to the US, this duplicity is perhaps more disturbing in the US in light of the frequency with which the US employs human rights as a rhetorical device.

As I contend in a related blog entry, I do not believe that the arguments supporting legislation against the legal recognition of homosexual marriages in the United States are consistent with the letter or the spirit of the U.S. Constitution. The pragmatic arguments against homosexual marriages are weak at best (particularly considering the dismal divorce rate in heterosexual marriages) and fail to justify current and proposed legislation on their own, leaving only the religious arguments underlying them---arguments which, of course, cannot legally be used to justify an act of Congress. Consequently, the burden of proof in the debate on the legislation lies not on the proponents to demonstrate that same-sex marriages should be acceptable but on the opponents to demonstrate, without resorting to hackneyed pseudo-religious dogma, that same-sex marriages both are economically or otherwise quantitatively detrimental to the public interest, and lead to the violation of individual rights. Unless such a basis can be offered, I offer that the current "Defense of Marriage Act", the proposed "Marriage Protection Act", and the many state-level imitations thereof are in diametric contradiction to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.