On the Job! Immigrant rights/ACLU

(On the Job! pays occasional notice to interesting intlaw job notices)

The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation is seeking applications for Director of its nearly quarter-century-old Immigrants' Rights Project, part of the ACLU’s Center for Equality.

Among the duties of the Director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project (detailed in full here) are:

► Report to the Director of the Center for Equality and will manage project offices located in both New York and California.

► Oversee a team of litigators and support staff with an active docket of cases in federal district and appellate courts throughout the country, and in the Supreme Court. Among the many current immigration-related matters is "national legal strategy against state and local anti-immigrant laws, including Arizona’s SB1070," about which we've posted.

► Help develop and coordinate non-litigation advocacy on immigration issues.

Qualifications sought (fully detailed here) include:

► J.D. degree strongly preferred; it or other training and background appropriate to the Director’s roles and responsibilities required.

► Significant experience either litigating complex constitutional cases or experience in immigration policy development and advocacy.

► Excellent analytical and writing skills.

► Willingness and ability to travel.

► Fluency in spoken and written Spanish a significant asset.
Application process detailed here. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled, which will not be before February 26, 2011. (hat tip Immigration Law Prof blog)

Bennoune's terrorism critique

Criticism of a decision to represent a "Yemen-based radical cleric" has drawn the attention of global news media.
► Representing the cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, 36 years ago and is thus a U.S. citizen, are the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union. At the end of August, the 2 nongovernmental organizations filed a challenge to a U.S. decision to target the plaintiff for assassination. Captioned Nasser Al-Alauqi v. Barack H. Obama, the suit is pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
► Criticizing that representation is a CCR board member, IntLawGrrl Karima Bennoune (below left). As reported in London's Guardian and excerpted at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog, Karima

has gone public with her misgivings at the CCR's decision, reflecting a debate within human rights groups on how to deal with Islamist fundamentalists.
'I support the important work the centre has done on torture and extraordinary rendition,' said Bennoune, 'but I expressed grave concern at CCR offering to represent Awlaki's interests pro bono. Anwar al-Awlaki is not a detainee; he is still at liberty and able to gravely harm others by inciting and advocating murder.'
Bennoune pointed out that Awlaki published an article in al-Qaida's English language magazine, Inspire, in July openly calling for assassinations of several people, including a young woman cartoonist in Seattle and Salman Rushdie. This was at around the time the CCR was offering to represent Awlaki's father, she said.
Bennoune, who is of Algerian descent, also expressed fears that the CCR and the ACLU were in danger of 'sanitising' Awlaki to western audiences.
'Since the inception of the case,' she said, 'there has been increased mystification of who Anwar al-Awlaki is in liberal and human rights circles in the United States. This may in part have resulted from the fact that a highly reputable organisation like CCR was willing to represent his interests, and described him only as "a Muslim cleric" or "an American citizen", and repeatedly suggested that the government did not possess evidence against Awlaki.'

Karima's stance dovetails with that she set out in her recent IntLawGrrls post, On 9/11, Remembering the Other’s Others: International Law & Muslim Fundamentalism, published on the 9th anniversary of the terrorist attacks. As described in the Guardian, Karima's position is further supported by 5 "prominent Algerian non-governmental organisations, including associations of victims of terrorism and women's groups."

On August 7

On this day in ...
... 1890 (120 years ago today), a daughter was born in Concord, New Hampshire, to emigrants from Ireland who espoused socialism and feminism. Their daughter, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (left), would work for both throughout her life. She gave her 1st public speech, "On Women Under Socialism," as a teenager. Her oratory soon got her kicked out of high school, and she became a full-time Industrial Workers of the World organizer. For this group -- whose slogan was "One Big Union," and which was known colloquially as the "Wobblies" -- Flynn, nicknamed "Rebel Girl," organized children, women, and men who worked in industries across the United States. In the wake of World War I she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union; in 1940 the ACLU kicked her off its executive board because she belonged to the Communist Party. That membership also prompted a 9-month trial -- at which she defended herself -- that ended in a Smith Act conviction and a prison sentence served at Alderson federal prison for women. (Among the lawyers who represented Flynn at points in her career was Mary M. Kaufman, previously among the women U.S. prosecutors at Nuremberg.) Having become in 1961 the 1st woman Chair of the U.S. Communist Party, Flynn died in Moscow on September 5, 1964. The Soviet government of Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave her "a full-scale state funeral in Red Square."

(Prior August 7 posts are here, here, and here.)

On May 5

On this day in ...
.... 1925 (85 years ago), a Dayton, Tennessee, John Scopes, a public high school teacher, was arrested for teaching evolution in violation of a new state law. Scopes had agreed to act as defendant in a test case just 1 day after the American Civil Liberties Union ran an ad seeking same in the Chattanooga Times. Scopes and other Daytonians "hoped that a trial of this type would bring much needed publicity to the tiny town..." A "media circus" of a trial ensued. (credit for photo made during the trial; more available here) Scopes was convicted, but the state's highest court later released him on a technicality. The Tennessee law barring instruction in the theory advanced by Charles Darwin would not be repealed until 1967.

(Prior May 5 posts are here, here, and here)

On January 20

On this day in ...

... 1920 (90 years ago today), the 3-year-old organization known as the National Civil Liberties Bureau, an offshoot of the 5-year-old American Union Against Militarism, "a group of social workers, reform advocates, and academics organized ... in response to the slide of the United States towards the European war," was renamed the American Civil Liberties Bureau, and within months became known as the American Civil Liberties Union. The name change was "intended to signal an expanded mission beyond the support of conscientious and political objectors to American military intervention in Europe." Among the projects within the ACLU's current mission is the John Adams Project. Evocative of the unpopular representation, by the man who would become the 2d U.S. President, of British troops accused in the Boston Massacre, this project aids legal representation for persons detained at Guantánamo.

(Prior January 20 posts are here and here.)

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

Last night, I had the honor of meeting Linn Duvall Harwell, the co-founder of the Clara Bell Duvall Reproductive Freedom Project of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, at an event celebrating the 30th anniversary of that organization. Linn told us stories of marching for women's rights with the National Organization for Women in Pittsburgh and being told that she and fellow marchers "should all be taken out and shot." She also reminded us of an era in which, alongside maternity wards, hospitals had separate wards dedicated to women dying from unsafe abortions. Linn founded the project because her mother, Clara Bell Duvall, died from a botched abortion, leaving behind five young children. Her words (from a speech at the 2004 March for Women's Lives) are so moving that I reprint them here as a reminder, for those of us who've never seen or imagined it, of what a world without safe abortion looked like:

As [my mother] lay dying, she said to my 10-year-old sister, "You will be the mother now." And to my grandmother, "Take care of my precious." This was my 18-month-old sister. Mother died March 27, 1929, in Mercy Hospital, Pittsburgh, PA. The archives say death was from "miscarriage." This was a lie. She died from a self-induced knitting needle abortion. She was 34 years old. As we children gathered around the polished casket that held her body for the three-day Irish wake, our father said, "We must stick together now." This was not to be. We were taken to Baltimore, divided among relatives. In a few days, we lost our mother, our father, and each other. I do not remember crying tears, yet I have wept inside all my life.

On June 11

On this day in ...
... 1993, in Wisconsin v. Mitchell, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a state statute that enhanced the otherwise-maximum penalty for offenses held to be hate crimes. In an opinion by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the Court held that adding on to the punishment at issue, aggravated battery, was not “aimed at conduct unprotected by the First Amendment”; rather, what was ““single[d] out for enhancement” was “bias inspired conduct because this conduct is thought to inflict greater individual and societal harm.”
... 1880, U.S. Rep. Jeannette Rankin (R-Mont.) (right), a suffragist and peace activist who in 1916 became the 1st woman elected to Congress, was born in Missoula, Montana. (photo credit) In 1912, she began working as the field secretary of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and was among the thousands of suffragists at the 1913 suffrage march in Washington, D.C. As a representative, she strongly opposed and voted against U.S. involvement in World War I. Having lost re-election in 1918, Rankin ran again in 1940, and won on an antiwar platform. She was the only representative to vote against U.S. entry into the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, saying,

'As a woman I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.'

Although Rankin did not run running for re-election in 1942, she remained politically active for the rest of her life. She was the 1st vice-president of the American Civil Liberties Union, and in January 1968, when she was 87, she led the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, a 5,000-person strong march on Washington to protest the Vietnam War. She died in 1973.

(Prior June 11 posts are here and here.)

Equal Pay on the way ? Fight on

On Thursday, President Obama signed his first piece of legislation: the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (photo credit, Ledbetter looking over the President's shoulder). The law overturns the Supreme Court 2007 ruling in Ledbetter v Goodyear, in which the Court held that an employee could not bring an action for wage discrimination more than 180 days after the first act of discrimination. Ledbetter had worked for Goodyear for 19 years when, several months before her retirement in 1998, she was tipped off by anonymous note that she was being paid less than men who held the same job. Unfortunately, this is not surprising. According to my ACLU e-newsletter, despite passage of the Equal Pay Act more than 45 years ago, (white) women currently average only 78 cents for every dollar men earn. Women of color earn even less. Even more unfortunately, the new law won't change this: the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act will not grant fair pay, but restore the principle that an employee's right to take action to put an end to discrimination lasts as long as the discrimination continues by providing that each discriminatory paycheck issued resets the 180-day statute of limitations.
The ACLU therefore recommends we push for passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act, which will close Equal Pay Act loopholes and strengthen its weak remedies. It will also strengthen outreach, education and enforcement efforts and prohibit retaliation against employees who ask about their employers' wage practices.

Gag orders unconstitutional

Kudos to the ACLU, whose case Doe v. Mukasey resulted in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals' striking down Patriot Act provisions that impose gag orders on those who receive national security letters. A national security letter (NSL) is a document that allows the FBI to obtain information about you without first getting a warrant from a judge, which means without your 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure being protected. Not surprisingly, after the Patriot Act made it easier to use national security letters, their use - and abuse - increased dramatically. One of the problems in challenging NSLs has been the gag order (image credit) that accompanies it - the recipient may not tell anyone they've received the NSL. In Doe v. Mukasey, the recipient of the NSL represented by the ACLU is an internet service provider who is still subject to a gag order after more than 4 years, even though the FBI was no longer seeking the information it had requested. As a result, the ACLU cannot reveal their clients' name and the provider cannot say it received the NSL
The court invalidated provisions that required NSL recipients to initiate judicial review of gag orders and limited that review. It held that the government must bear the burden of going to court to justify silencing NSL recipients, and that the limits placed on judicial review essentially required the courts to defer entirely to the executive branch. Such deference runs counter to "well-settled First Amendment standards and deprive[s] the judiciary of its important function as a protector of fundamental rights," according to Arthur Eisenberg, Legal Director for the New York Civil Liberties Union. As a result of the ruling, the government will have to justify the gag order on this NSL recipient.

Heartfelt welcome to our newest IntLawGrrl, Dina Francesca Haynes

It's our great pleasure today to welcome a new IntLawGrrl, Dina Francesca Haynes (left).
Dina's an Associate Professor of Law at the New England School of Law, where she teaches courses related to immigration, international law and ethics. She has also taught at Georgetown University Law Center, American University’s Washington College of Law, and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
Prior to teaching law, she spent a decade practicing international law, including such positions as Director General of the Human Rights Department for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and as Human Rights Advisor to the OSCE in Serbia and Montenegro. She has also worked for the United Nations, serving as a Protection Officer in Croatia with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, and in various position in Rwanda and Afghanistan for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. She also was an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice in what was then known as the Immigration & Naturalization Service, and she clerked on the Constitutional Court of South Africa.
Dina earned her B.A. degree at the University of Denver, her J.D. at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, and her LL.M. at Georgetown University Law Center. She's the author of Deconstructing the Reconstruction: Human Rights and the Rule of Law in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (Ashgate 2008). Ethical issues related to the international civil serviceis the subject of her 1st post, below. Other areas of research and writing include immigration law, human rights law, human trafficking, public international law, international organizations, U.N. law, post-conflict reconstruction, humanitarian law, and migration.
She's chosen to dedicate her IntLawGrrls posts to Joan Fitzpatrick (1950-2003), at the time of her passing a leading human rights scholar and Professor of Law at the University of Washington, Seattle. Dina writes of Fitzpatrick (below left):

Joan Fitzpatrick was a brilliant teacher, an internationally renowned scholar and an admired human rights activist who dedicated her life to improving human rights around the world. She was also one of the few female international human rights lawyers practicing when I was a law student, and the only woman I could find then to look up to and emulate. When I took a position as a summer associate with Paul Hoffman at the American Civil Liberties Union in Los Angeles, and I learned that she was working with him on the case to which I’d been assigned, ­Alvarez-Machain (later Sosa), I was thrilled. Her contributions to human rights law, the rights of immigrants and asylum seekers, and to forging a path for IntlLawGrrls everywhere were considerable and meaningful, and I am thankful for her work and legacy.

Today Fitzpatrick joins other transnational foremothers in the list just below our "visiting from..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

(Illegal) US operations in Pakistan

On Thursday (September 11th), 7 years after the Bush administration launched an unsuccessful "war" against terrorism, I read Karima Bennoune's excellent post on countering terrorism by enforcing human rights, then went on to read in the Herald Tribune that

President George W. Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government ....

Just as I asked myself, "isn't that illegal?" I saw that "[i]t was unclear precisely what legal authorities the United States has invoked to conduct even limited ground raids in a friendly country." Indeed. Colombia's cross-border military attack on FARC rebels in Ecuador in March was considered by the Organization of American States (OAS) to be a violation of principles of international law, as well as of Ecuador's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
But more than illegality, at a time when the world is remembering and honoring the victims of the 9/11 attacks and the soldiers from numerous nations fighting and dying in Afghanistan because of those attacks, it seems to me the important issue is that "last week's raid achieved little except killing civilians and stoking anti-Americanism in the tribal areas." As Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the US so succintly put it: "Unilateral action by the American forces does not help the war against terror because it only enrages public opinion." So as we voters go to the polls in November, please let us heed Karima's words and vote in favor of secularism and women's rights rather than militarism as a way to counter terrorism. As our favorite French newpaper, Le Canard Enchaîné (which does not publish a full electronic version) reminds us with respect to candidate McCain's appreciation of Teddy Roosevelt's famous "big stick," (image of Thomas Nast's 1904 cartoon recreating an episode in Gulliver's Travels) it can hit hard--like a boomerang (image credit)!

1st Gitmo trial begins

After years of litigation that included a trip to the U.S. Supreme Court -- see Hamdan v. Rumsfeld -- a military commission at Guantánamo will hear opening arguments this morning in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan (right). It is the 1st trial for anyone whom the United States captured in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. (Meanwhile, back in Washington, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey called upon Congress to write new rules for detainees who pursue habeas petitions, as the Court last month made clear, in Boumediene v. Bush, that they have a right to do.)
Hamdan, alleged to have been a chauffeur for Osama bin Laden, is charged with the offenses of conspiracy and material support for terrorism. Hamdan entered a plea of not guilty before a military judge yesterday, and a jury of 6 military officers, plus, 1 alternate, quickly was chosen. At least 2/3 of the jury must agree on a verdict. The "trial in a small, windowless courtroom" is expected to last 3 weeks.
On Day 1 the judge issued a split decision on defendant's challenge to the admissibility of statements made during interrogation. Those made at Bagram Air Base and Panshir in Afghanistan cannot be used on account of what the judge called the "'highly coercive environments and conditions under which they were made.'" The judge refused, however, to issue a blanket ban on statements made at Guantánamo, notwithstanding defendant's contention that they too were impermissibly obtained.
The chief prosecutor, Army Col. Lawrence Morris, said that the ruling would not harm its case:

'It does not reduce my confidence in our ability fully to depict Mr. Hamdan's criminality. We're fine.'

And before the ruling, the defense appeared less than confident about the final result:
... Hamdan's military lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, said the trial

'is going to be deficient. It's going to proceed, but . . . there are fundamental flaws in this system. I don't know that I can predict an acquittal.'

Observers from Human Rights First are blogging the Hamdan trial here; the American Civil Liberties Union is set to begin blogging later in the week.

Up the road from Scottsboro, Justice Stevens speaks out against capital punishment

It seems fitting that Justice John Paul Stevens chose Chattanooga for his 1st public comments since he declared that capital punishment is unconstitutional with these words in Baze v. Rees:

"[T]he imposition of the death penalty represents 'the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the State [is] patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.'"

Stevens reaffirmed that conclusion Friday, telling jurists assembled in Chattanooga for the 6th Circuit Judicial Conference that when Eight Belles collapsed after placing 2d in the May 3 Kentucky Derby and was put to death on the track, "'I had checked the procedure they used to kill the horse.'" He discovered that Kentucky forbids using on animals 1 of the 3 drugs frequently employed in lethal-injection executions. According to Monica Mercer of the Chattanooga Times Free Press, Stevens "suggested" that the doomed filly "had probably experienced a more humane death than those who die on death row."
Chattanooga, it may be remembered, was the intended destination of 9 African-American young men whom a sheriff's posse pulled off a freight train and brought to Scottsboro, Alabama, where within weeks most were convicted of capital rape (a crime now under Supreme Court review) and sentenced to death.
On this date in 1931, 8 of the condemned Scottsboro defendants were interviewed by teacher-author-activist Hollace Ransdell, who wrote in her report, commissioned by the American Civil Liberties Union:

I visited them there in their cells in the death row on May 12, locked up two together in a cell, frightened children caught in a terrible trap without understanding what it is all about.

Cases of 2 Scottsboro defendants resulted in landmark Supreme Court judgments: Powell v. Alabama (1932) established that the Constitution guarantees indigent capital defendants a right to effective appointed counsel, while Norris v. Alabama (1935) held that the county's systematic exclusion of African Americans from the jury pool violated the Constitution's equal protection guarantees. No Scottsboro defendant was executed.
Alabama retains capital punishment, however, as do 3 of the 4 states in the 6th Circuit: Kentucky, home to the Derby and the Baze case, Tennessee, home to Chattanooga, and Ohio have a total of 4 women and 317 men on death row (the 4th state in the circuit, Michigan, does not permit the death penalty). Thus it's worth noting that Stevens' criticism of the sentence reportedly "drew a round of applause" from the scores of federal judges and hundreds of lawyers in attendance.
Stevens indicated that even as he continues to adhere to Court precedents authorizing capital punishment -- indeed, he voted against capital defendants on the precise issues at bar in Baze and in a consular-access case, Medellín -- he welcomes discussion on the ultimate question. Referring to the former decision, Chattanooga's Mercer wrote:

Justice Stevens ... conceded his opinion would 'generate debate not only about the constitutionality of the three-drug protocol, but also about the justification for the death penalty itself.'

(Photo credit; cross-posted at Slate's Convictions blog)

"Saudi woman faces death for witchcraft"

The headline says it all. Human Rights Watch broke the story about condemned prisoner Fawza Falih Muhammad Ali earlier this week, when it published this letter to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud. And Judith Weingarten, who's guest-blogged here at IntLawGrrls, has more here at her Zenobia blog.

On January 11, ...

... 1885, suffragist Alice Paul was born to "an upper middle-class Quaker family" in Moorestown, New Jersey. Paul (right) attended Swarthmore College and earned a doctorate in social work from the University of Pennsylvania. Graduate studies took her to England, where she embraced the militant feminism of Emmeline Pankhurst and associates. Back home in the United States, Paul applied the lessons she'd learned to raise public consciousness on the suffrage issue. She is perhaps best known for unflagging, yet unsuccessful, efforts to have the Equal Rights Amendment, introduced in 1923, become part of the Constitution. In draft, that amendment stated: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex." Paul is an inspiration to IntLawGrrls guest blogger Deborah Popowski.
... 2002, the 1st plane of persons captured during the post-9/11 counterassault in Afghanistan were brought to the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they faced indefinite detention, most without charges or trial. (photo credit) As we've posted (39 posts so far!), the camp remains open to this day. About 700 persons, seized not only in Afghanistan but also at other sites in what the U.S. executive calls the "Global War on Terror," have been detained there. The GTMO detainee population has dropped. But it's increased at another offshore U.S. military site -- Bagram, mentioned in my article on Gitmo. The New York Times reported earlier this week:

The American detention center, established at the Bagram military base as a temporary screening site after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, is now teeming with some 630 prisoners — more than twice the 275 being held at Guantánamo.

The American Civil Liberties Union's marking the date with the message at right.

Doris Lessing, Tariq Ramadan, and ideological exclusion

My friend Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU's National Security Project, has an excellent letter to the editor in today's NY Times, in which he notes that the U.S. government refused to issue a visa to Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing after she joined the Communist Party, and didn't allow her to visit the country until 1969. He links this dubious historical practice with the current ideological exclusion of foreign scholars based solely on their political views, including Tariq Ramadan. Let us not forget Nalini Ghuman (right), a foreign scholar who hasn't even been informed of the grounds for her exclusion, about whom I have blogged here. In Jaffer's words:

[Ideological exclusion is] a shameful practice that doesn’t befit a democracy. It put the United States in dubious company during the cold war, as Ms. Lessing’s case shows, and it does the same today.

Diplomats and domestic workers

It seems that the U.S. government is finally starting to take seriously the problem of domestic worker abuse by the foreign diplomats and officials of international organizations. This problem was first exposed in a 2001 report entitled Hidden in the Home, by Human Rights Watch researcher Carol Pier. These workers, who are brought to the U.S. on A-3, G-5 or NATO-7 special visas, can suffer a range of human rights violations – from wage and hour exploitation, emotional and physical abuse, and even forced labor and trafficking. But because of their employers’ diplomatic immunity, redress for these abuses remains elusive. Although there is a "commercial activity" exception to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Immunity, courts have been reluctant to interpret the exception to encompass domestic work.
In an effort to address the immunity problem, the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, Break the Chain Campaign, CASA of Maryland, and Global Rights and law clinics at the University of North Carolina School of Law and at American University Washington College of Law, have been working to encourage the U.S. government to provide legal or administrative remedies to domestic workers who seek redress for these violations. In a series of meetings with the U.S. Departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security, these and other organizations have been exploring possible government actions to better protect the rights of these workers – including documenting diplomatic abuse in the annual Trafficking in Persons Report, improved interviewing procedures at U.S. consulates abroad, and the creation of government databases to track complaints of workers abuse. Meanwhile, efforts are underway to attempt to codify such reforms in the 2007 Reauthorization of the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act.
Also jumping into the fray is the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which is currently investigating the issue at the request of Senators Richard Durbin and Tom Coburn, Chair and Ranking Minority Member, respectively, of the Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, Committee of the Judiciary.

Something to hide?

Jorge Bustamante, the UN Human Rights Council's independent expert on migrant rights, wraps up his investigation of human rights violations against immigrants in the U.S. this Friday. Responding to concern in the United Nations over anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, Bustamante took testimony from migrants, met with government officials, and interviewed community activists. He was in Los Angeles during the May Day immigrants' rights marches, and noted that "[t]he way the local police physically abused marchers represents right there a violation of human rights." Perhaps more concerning than the abuses seen during his visit is what Bustamante will not have seen before leaving the country on Friday: the federal government has cancelled scheduled visits to two of three immigration detention centers. Bustamante was denied access to Monmouth County Correctional Institution today -- particularly disturbing because of the ACLU's investigation of mistreatment at that jail. Even more troubling was Homeland Security's cancellation last Monday, May 7 of Bustamante's scheduled visit to the Hutto family detention center, now notorious for its imprisonment of immigrant families, as described by "Anna Koransky" [IntLawGrrl Naomi Norberg] here. Richard Grenell, the spokesperson for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations claims that the United States has "nothing to hide and is comfortable showing the world our practices." But UN expert Bustamante will leave with a very different impression after being denied access to detention centers: "[m]y interpretation is that there is something the government doesn't want people to see."

The global race to the bottom: drugging deportees

Mention forcibly sedating deportees, and you may envision extraordinary rendition of blindfolded and shackled terrorism suspects in private aircraft to secret destinations -- but in reality, the practice is much more common and much more widespread. On Wednesday, the ACLU of Southern California publicized its investigation into Homeland Security's forcible sedation of immigrants in order to deport them. The Los Angeles Daily Journal quotes DHS: "[u]nder no circumstances are detainees medicated solely to facilitate transport, unless a medical professional determines that they present a danger to themselves and others," but one ACLU client has no history of mental illness and denies resisting deportation, while the other had a stay of deportation pending his appeal. Sadly, the horrifying practice of medicating detainees against their will for non-medical reasons has already gone global: detention center staff report that Australia has forcibly sedated detainees for deportation since 2000; Japan reportedly injected detainees with drugs and deported them "in a state of trance"; German police forcibly sedated a detainee who then died of heart failure; and even Finland forcibly drugged a Ukrainian family against their will in order to deport them. It seems that many of our peer nations are all too willing to cast aside their human rights obligations in order to keep immigrants out. So how do we stop this race to the bottom? In addition to domestic lawsuits and media campaigns, given the implications for medical ethics, non-state actors might provide a transnational solution: In Australia, for example, the New South Wales Nurses' Association advised its members that "participating in the non-consensual administration of medication to immigration detainees would constitute an illegal act." Perhaps medical associations could work across borders to ensure that doctors and nurses worldwide, consistent with their professional obligations, respect the human rights of immigrants. After all, as one forcibly drugged immigrant eloquently notes, he is "no animal," but a human with rights just like the rest of us.