Despite early leadership in creating the international human rights framework, the United States continues to struggle with ensuring that human rights are protected both at home and abroad.
A Leader in the Creation of the International Human Rights Framework
The United States was an early leader in developing international human rights law, both in the drafting and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, and by playing a prominent role at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunals. However, since the 1950s, foreign policy and domestic interests have repeatedly led the U.S. to withdraw its support for, and sometimes directly oppose the international human rights system.
Human Rights in the United States Today
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, we saw the creation of an unprecedented torture program by the Bush Administration as part of its so-called “war on terror.” Authorized at the highest levels of government, a program of cruel psychological and physical abuse was applied to detainees in U.S. custody at Guantánamo Bay and other U.S.-controlled sites around the world. Though President Barack Obama ended the CIA torture program, his administration continued to imprison, without trial, close to two dozen detainees at the Guantánamo Bay facility and refused to hold accountable those responsible for the Bush-era torture program. The Obama administration also greatly increased U.S. reliance on extrajudicial killings overseas in its fight against terrorism.
Today, the United States continues its decline in the protection of human rights at home and abroad. The extrajudicial killings of Black Americans and state violence in communities of color continues unabated. The U.S. military has been deployed to suppress protest in American cities. We have seen an unprecedented scale of arrest, inhumane detention, and removals of migrants across the country. Non-white Americans have been targeted for arrest by federal immigration agents. During the first Trump administration, the government’s continued refusal to hold U.S. officials accountable for their roles in war crimes and torture in connection with the war in Afghanistan took a dramatic turn with the sanctioning of members of the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor for its investigations into war crimes in Afghanistan. The second Trump administration has taken that a step further, sanctioning senior prosecutors and judges at the ICC, as well as civil society organizations supporting the ICC’s work on war crimes in Palestine and other country situations.
Meanwhile, U.S. actors continue to play a role in atrocities overseas. Former members of the U.S. national security establishment sell their know-how and technologies to repressive regimes around the world, building surveillance networks to target journalists and human rights defenders. U.S. companies rely on slavery and forced labor to produce the products we see in American stores. Mercenaries trained by the U.S. military sell their services to foreign governments to carry out assassination campaigns against political opponents.
CJA works on only a small fraction of the human rights issues in the United States and is privileged to partner with and work alongside many of others in the struggle to hold the United States to its international human rights obligations at home and abroad.