At my internship last summer, what I really took away was the importance of pioneering a new approach to human rights. The 20th century approach to human rights was in defining human rights standards - like the International Covenants on Civil & Political Rights, and Economic, Social, & Cultural rights. I’m sure you know how incredibly important these covenants were - they revolutionized the way of thinking about human rights, and they provide some benchmark through which to keep countries accountable. They provided NGOs with a guideline - what standards to follow, what rights to lobby for. They provide a pathway forward. The debate still continues about economic, social, and cultural rights: what obligation does this mean, exactly, for governments? Many people still argue about how exactly to implement these standards.

But this hasn’t been enough, and what we need now is a new and different approach. We need to shift away from a time of declaration and into the era of implementation.

What does this mean? It means we have many of the right laws on the books, particularly enshrined in international covenants and agreements, but we simply haven’t been able to implement these laws properly. Even though the current debate is about social & economic rights - in particular, the rights to things like health, education, credit, water, or even “development” - the older, more accepted civil and political rights are not guaranteed in most countries, either.

Organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch - the two most prominent human rights organizations of our time - are doing amazing work in terms of bringing to light the human rights abuses taking place around the globe. However, while Amnesty’s work might result in releasing individual political prisoners, this approach to human rights lobbying and petitioning does not result in systematic transformation. While Amnesty’s lobbying might get a few political prisoners out of jail, the original system that oppressed them and their rights remains. Some might be saved, but more and more will continue to be imprisoned, tortured, or threatened in other ways.

What is needed is systematic change. The systems need to change, themselves, in order for lasting change to occur. Like any other aid organization, the work done by Amnesty is simply like a band-aid on a gashing wound if the broader system and situation in the relevant country does not change. The goal is not just to save individual people, but to change the system and address the root of the problem such that in the future, more people do not undergo the same fate.

How can this be achieved? Systematic change mostly depends on democratization and good governance. It depends on instituting leaders who are accountable to their people and genuinely want to contribute to development and positive social change for people in their countries. In countries with dictators, extremely weak or collapsed governments, or perhaps worst, genocidal governments and leaders, the efforts of human rights organizations simply cannot have a lasting effect. Both an overly strong state/dictatorship and an extremely weak, failed government are both recipes for chaos and violations of civil and political rights.

And at the local level, everyday people are being tortured, denied access to lawyers, and suffer for years in jails without ever going to trial. Prison conditions in many developing countries are terrible. I’ve written about this before. How does systematic transformation work here? Building up domestic legal systems: putting in place more legal aid lawyers, trained judges, prosecutors, paralegals, and other stakeholders who are desperately needed to end legal abuse and human rights violations. Police forces have to be trained in non-coercive interrogation methods.

We need more systematic approaches to addressing civil & political rights by changing the system, and by implementing rights standards on a local level - especially in the latter area (improving legal systems). Why is there so much focus on the former, individualized approach and less focus on systematic reform? It’s a lot harder, a lot more complex, and a lot less straightforward, that’s for sure. But it’s needed if we are to progress in systematic change in the human rights arena.

Charles Taylor Trial (Credit: BBC)

I just ran across this fascinating Time interview with Stephen Rapp, who was previously chief prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone (H/T Shelby Grossman). Rapp states:

The concern all of us had was that we were conducting justice in a comfortable courtroom with long trials and well-paid attorneys. Prisoners had single cells, and they had committed the worst crimes. A mile away in the local prison there were simply no resources. Cases can’t go forward, witnesses are lost, and people stay in detention for many years at a stretch. [If I was] to do it over, I would try to develop a court within the national system. That would be my preference. Maybe not a court that costs $30 million a year like the Special Court, but an appropriate court.

This is something I thought about while writing the post “Villains & Supervillains,” after my trip to The Hague with the ICC Student Network last year, but never fully articulated.

I understand that many of these “supervillians” - war criminals, genocidaires, leaders who have led crimes against humanity, are some of the worst perpetrators in that world. For that reason, they receive special attention, and they are given fair trials and adequate living conditions. They are allowed to represent themselves in court, and a great deal of attention is paid to their trials to ensure they are truly fair. This all makes complete sense, because their trials are, and should be, high profile and well publicized in order to draw attention to their horrific crimes and resulting punishments, and thereby contribute to ending the atmosphere of impunity worldwide. Without fair trials and without widespread publicity of these proceedings, there is no chance that the justice being done will deter future perpetrators (though the possibility of deterrence itself is arguable).

But the greater travesty and grosser injustice is the fact that we are pumping millions of dollars into international courts which have doubtful impacts, and are simultaneously completely ignoring the life-threatening conditions in the national justice systems of many developing countries. Isn’t this ironic? While war criminals are getting the royal treatment, everyday people - many of them poor - are arbitrarily detained in various African countries, often for stealing a piece of bread or for political reasons. In many African countries, torture continues to be widespread as an interrogative tool despite laws in the books prohibiting it.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), 80% of prisoners are in pre-trial detention, and there is no law criminalizing torture. In Kenya, even petty offenders must wait an average of 5 years to have their case heard. In Kampala, Uganda, many prisons are overcrowded, often at 300% of capacity. And in Nigeria, women are held alongside men in prison, often leading to rape and sexual violence. In Zimbabwe, news reports have shown emaciated inmates starving to death from lack of food, often forced to catch and eat rats to survive.

The criminal justice systems of many developing countries are in far worse conditions than that of the U.S., and are arbitrary, unfair, and life-threatening. If the international community devoted one-tenth of the attention to this issue as they do to providing fair trials to supervillains, then many more innocent lives would be saved.

As the status quo stands, a guy who is responsible for the genocide of thousands gets a lawyer of his own and a fair trial, while the poor, innocent, arbitrarily detained are tortured and starve to death without ever having access to counsel. Is this fair, or just? I don’t think so. This doesn’t mean we should pay less attention to war criminals, but that we should work harder to ensure a fair trial to those who are not.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers. Thank you so much for reading, commenting, tweeting, or discussing these issues with me. It genuinely means a lot, and I put time and effort into writing this blog not only because I personally love writing, but also because I love interacting with all of you on a regular basis. So thanks for stopping by!

While you are spending time with your family & friends today, don’t forget about all those out there who don’t have the same privileges. This blog aims to highlight some of the problems we face today - like genocide, conflict, poverty, oppression of women and minorities, malfunctioning justice systems, and human rights violations. But I also try, as much as I can, to talk about the solutions to these problems.

One thing I’ve been doing is fundraising for International Bridges to Justice (IBJ), an amazing human rights NGO working to end torture and reform criminal justice systems in the developing world. In many developing countries that IBJ works in - like India, Rwanda, Burundi, Zimbabwe, and Cambodia - people don’t have the same legal rights as we do. It’s easy to be arbitrarily detained and tortured in prison, despite being innocent or committing a small crime like stealing a piece of bread. Prison conditions are often harsh, with lack of food, sanitation, or healthcare.

I’d ask you to please take just $10 out of your pocket this Thanksgiving to donate to IBJ. ALL the money you donate will be matched up to $125,000 until December 10. Thanks to all my generous friends & family members, I’ve raised $1,189 already!! Please help me reach my goal of $1500. All the money is going directly to fund grassroots legal reform projects, and WILL make an impact!

Click here to donate! Thanks again & have a wonderful Thanksgiving

A sign on the wall reads: The prison is not behind bars, nor is liberty found in the street. There exist both imprisoned men among the streets and free men in prisons. It is a matter of conscience. (Photo by Michelle Ferng)

I’m always getting to news late on this blog, because I constantly have things I want to say. So although this post refers to a news story from last week, I still feel a need to write about it - because it has haunted me ever since I read it. Last week the New Yorker published a moving, beautifully written feature about Todd Willingham, an innocent man arrested and put to death in Texas for killing his own children through arson.

I can’t stop thinking about it. Todd Willingham woke up in his house to find it on fire - he ran downstairs to try to save his children, but couldn’t get inside their room. About to pass out from the smoke, he stumbled out of the house, unable to help his kids even though he was desperate to do so. Soon firefighters arrived but even they were unable to get to his kids in time. He was completely devastated - he loved his children.

However, arson “specialists” soon investigated his house and apparently found clear signs that the fire had been set on purpose. Willingham immediately became the primary suspect and soon others began testifying that he was a bit “crazy.” He was imprisoned and it seemed clear that he deserved the death penalty. The only problem: no one had really found a motive.

Here’s the saddest part. Over a decade later, a woman began corresponding with Todd privately and began looking into the case. She found so many flaws — people’s testimony had changed over time and some of the witnesses were clearly unreliable. Then she sent the fire records to an expert scientist who found that the previous investigator had not been an arson expert and had made a lot of unwarranted assumptions. It was concluded that the fire had been set off accidentally. Todd was found to be innocent just before his execution and the evidence was all there — but the Texas courts refused to commute his execution. He was executed anyway, even after found to be clearly innocent.

If nothing else, this strikes me as a clear reason to abolish the death penalty. The death penalty doesn’t allow for mistakes, but the problem is that the US justice system IS rife with mistakes. So if you’re wrong, you have just killed an innocent person. Here are some shocking statistics from The Innocence Project, a great organization working to exonerate wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing:

• There have been 242 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States.
• The average length of time served by exonerees is 12 years.
• The average age of exonerees at the time of their wrongful convictions was 26.
• 144 of these 242 people were African American. Clearly there’s something wrong going on here.
• Since 1989, there have been tens of thousands of cases where prime suspects were identified and pursued—until DNA testing (prior to conviction) proved that they were wrongly accused.
• Eyewitness misidentification testimony is the leading cause of wrongful convictions. At least 40 percent of these eyewitness identifications involved a cross racial identification. Studies have shown that people are less able to recognize faces of a different race than their own (I find this really interesting).

Beyond this, there are so many of the other arguments - that it costs so much more to put someone to death than to imprison them for life, and moreover that it really has little impact on deterrence of future criminals. There have been studies documenting this. So why put people to death anyway? It doesn’t make sense to me.

But beyond this, what this article made me think is that if such huge mistakes are made due to inadequate research…who else is slipping through the cracks of the U.S. justice system? Public defenders are completely overburdened with cases. They are often unable to dedicate enough time to each client. How many of these clients are put in prison for crimes they did not commit? How many people are unable to afford a lawyer, and thus lack adequate representation — like Todd Willingham? How many people are given long sentences in prison while they require shorter ones? How many people are imprisoned when they really need rehabilitation — and then come out even MORE hardened by jail? It really makes you wonder; the system is in dire need of reform, and yet little attention seems to be given to the issue..

Image credit: New Yorker

Oftentimes, it seems to me that criminal justice reform falls to the wayside in light of many more seemingly pressing issues, even within the broader human rights community. People tend to look down on criminal justice reform, wondering why resources need to be spent on assisting those who are accused of crimes, when they would be much better spent on the rest of the population that is clearly not guilty. Why should we help people who are criminals anyway?

Sure, I understand this logic and to an extent I would even agree with it. However, in the U.S., far too much money is spent on the criminal justice system. Harsh sentences and prison time are given to those who often have committed nonviolent offenses (e.g. drug dealing) and there are mandatory minimum sentences, which give judges little discretion to adjust or reduce the sentences given for particular crimes - leading to increased years in prison where it is unnecessary. By putting drug offenders in jail and increasing the time in jail for the accused more generally, the government is stretching its justice system to the limits. As more people go to prison for longer periods of time, maintaining this system becomes increasingly expensive and a drain on state resources. By reforming the criminal justice sector, we are helping free up more money and resources for the other sectors - less money spent on the justice system leads to more state resources for education and healthcare. This is just one reason we should care.

Though the justice system in the U.S. is incredibly flawed, I’m even more surprised about the minimal attention given to the failed justice sectors in many developing countries. In much of the developing world, injustices caused by the criminal justice sector are far greater than those in the U.S. Take Zimbabwe, a primary example of the horrid prison conditions for inmates in developing countries. Reports suggest that inmates in Zimbabwe’s prisons are literally starving to death, while sick and healthy prisoners are living together in overcrowded cells.

“There are people there who look worse than the photographs of prisoners in [Nazi concentration camps] Dachau and Auschwitz,” - Roy Bennett, Imprisoned MDC politician, speaking on release in March

If you remain unconvinced, you might argue: well, even if the prison conditions are bad, they are still criminals. Why should a developing country, with even more limited resources than the U.S., work on fixing the justice system when the regular population is itself poor? To this I say - in many countries, it’s not just the horrible conditions of the prisons themselves that is a problem, but the lack of an entire legal infrastructure. This means that in many countries, you could easily be accused of a crime you did not commit, and then thrown into jail without being guaranteed a lawyer or a fair trial; you could languish in jail for years in pre-trial detention and be tortured by the police to divulge information that you may not even have. In Rwanda, for instance, more than 80% of defendants remain unrepresented and without access to a lawyer. Thus, we see that in many developing countries, oftentimes those who are languishing in prison are not the truly guilty - they are many times poor and marginalized, unfairly accused and without access to legal advice, and so deserve as much attention as the average person who has not been accused.

Shocking as this is, what’s more shocking is that there are situations like this in many developing countries. And what’s even more shocking is that the media and even the international human rights community pay little attention to criminal justice reform in developing countries. To be honest, I’m extremely disappointed in the Change.org criminal justice blog because it focuses for the most part on the American justice system, and rarely alludes to the rest of the world, where conditions are often even worse! Change.org is a popular destination and the criminal justice blog is perfectly poised to inform its readers of the failures of criminal justice worldwide - but unfortunately doesn’t fulfill this by choosing to focus narrowly on the U.S. There is so much to be said that isn’t.

Ultimately, I hope people begin to understand the role of criminal justice reform within the broader human rights movement, and I hope that this begins happening soon. The justice sector is in great need of assistance, and though it may not be a “sexy” issue, it is no less important than detainment of journalists and political prisoners, conflict, or even poverty.

Picture credit: rayphua on flickr