Bringing Human Rights Home

This panel explored the real and perceived gaps between U.S. civil and constitutional law and international human rights protections, including those arising from the Inter-American System. The panel considered the reasons for these gaps, including how U.S. exceptionalism has created obstacles to greater U.S. accountability within the international human rights framework. 

The panel also unpacked whether the human rights frame can be wielded to liberatory and emancipatory ends, engaging with fundamental critiques of human rights including: that it is reinscribed into structural hierarchies of power and inequality; bound up with liberal democracy and neo-liberalism; and rooted in structural legacies of colonialism, settler-colonialism, the slave trade and empire.  

UCLA School of Law is a State Bar of California approved MCLE provider. This session is approved for 1.25 HOURS of general MCLE credit. 

Panelists

• Aslı Bâli, Yale Law
• James Cavallaro, University Human Rights Network & former IACHR President
• Jamil Dakwar, ACLU 
• Elisa Massimino, Georgetown Law 

Moderator

• S. Priya Morley, Promise Institute 

MCLE Readings

• E. Tendayi Achiume & Asli Ü Bâli, Race and Empire: Legal Theory Within, Through, and Across National Borders
• James L. Cavallaro and Stephanie Erin Brewer, The Virtue of Following: Role of Inter-American Litigation in Campaigns for Social Justice   

The human rights practitioners and advocates on this panel discussed the rights-based social movements they work with and how those movements for social justice intersect with the human rights frame. They discussed the benefits of human rights discourse and using international human rights mechanisms. 

In the process, we hoped to answer the following questions: what are the short and long-term strategies for using international human rights mechanisms to achieve social change? Which international human rights mechanisms have proven effective in these struggles? How has the use of the Inter-American System for Human Rights served as a tool in this struggle? 

UCLA School of Law is a State Bar of California approved MCLE provider. This session is approved for 1.25 HOURS of general MCLE credit. 

Panelists

• Andrea Guerrero, Alliance San Diego
• Lauren van Schilfgaarde, UCLA Law

Discussant

• Soledad García Muñoz, REDESCA 

Moderator

• Catherine Sweetser, Promise Institute 

MCLE Readings

• National Legal of Cities, Using Right to Counsel as an Eviction Diversion Strategy
• ACT-LA, Metro as Sanctuary: Reimagining Safety on Public Transit 

This presentation focused on U.S. human rights violations abroad. Student Steffi Colao combined legal, empirical, and historical viewpoints to critique the U.S. airborne strike campaign against al-Shabaab. She argued that present U.S. intervention in Somalia reiterates longstanding imperialist strategies. As legal critique of airborne strikes has become an insufficient constraint on the U.S. government’s use of the tactic, Colao offered a historical critique to supplement advocacy for ending the policy. 

*This workshop will take place in Room 1420.*

Student Author

• Steffi Colao, J.D. Candidate, UCLA School of Law

Discussant

• Ahilan Arulanantham, UCLA Law

Student Paper

• Back Again: How Airborne Strikes Against al-Shabaab Further U.S. Imperialism
  • Appendix A

This panel explored different mechanisms for holding rights violators accountable within the US, including government entities and private actors, and the myriad challenges to ensuring accountability. In particular, the panel examined how a transitional justice framework might be utilized to address racialized and other inequalities within the U.S., what options exist to address the rights violations of migrants in U.S. custody, and how corporate actors can be held accountable for human rights abuses committed abroad.

Speakers

• Katherine Gallagher, Center for Constitutional Rights
• Máximo Langer, UCLA Law
• Zinaida Miller, Northeastern Law
• Sarah Paoletti, Penn Law

Moderator

• Jess Peake, Promise Institute

Karen McCarthy Woolf’s Fulbright research Un/Safe is a poetry-photo-lyric, travelogue and meditation on the US as a settler nation. She read poems written while in residence at the Promise Institute that explore barbed wire, gentrification and carceral economics as state violence against black, brown and working-class bodies. 

Poet

• Karen McCarthy Woolf, Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar and Promise Writer in Residence