PREPARING FOR THE USA CAMPAIGN

by Paul Hoffman, Chair, Board of Directors

Amnesty International

Amnesty International will launch its first worldwide campaign on human rights violations in the United States this fall. This is not, of course, the first time that AI has spoken out about violations here, but it is the first-ever campaign engaging our entire movement to address a broad range of U.S. human rights issues.

| Given the role of the United States today as the world's only superpower, the USA Campaign is especially important. It will present AIUSA members with both great opportunities and great challenges.

One of our goals in this campaign is to reach out to other human rights and civil rights organizations. In the course of the year-long effort, Amnesty's global membership will be working on such issues as police abuse, prison conditions and the death penalty in this country, as well as other matters of vital concern to our sister organizations. So AIUSA activists will have many opportunities for joint action.

To be sure, there are also some limits to what we can do. One of Amnesty's basic policies is that our members do not work on certain human rights issues within their own countries. In order to maintain the organization's impartiality and integrity, AIUSA is allowed to address only certain kinds of issues in the United States.

However, the International Council Meeting, Amnesty's highest policy-making body, loosened these "work on own country" restrictions somewhat in 1995. AI now takes a more flexible approach that should help our members to act in concert with their colleagues in the worldwide movement. The International Executive Committee will provide specific guidelines about what our section can do during the USA Campaign. We expect that there will be ample room for AIUSA activism.

As for the challenges: It will strike some in our communities as odd that Amnesty is directing its attention to human rights violations in the United States. Even people very supportive of AI's work against abuses in other countries may become defensive about international scrutiny of our own domestic problems.

Addressing this kind of reaction from ordinary Americans, and from our public officials, is one of the most important challenges of the USA Campaign.

The United States has been pretty good at criticizing the human rights records of certain other countries and at working for the creation of some intemational human rights standards. But this country has never really accepted the fact that these standards apply within our borders.

The U.S. Government has ratified important human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Race Convention and the Convention Against Torture-but it has done so in a way that says these rights are not enforceable in our own courts.

In April, for example, the International Court of Justice ordered the United States not to let Virginia execute a Paraguayan citizen, Francisco Breard, while the court heard Paraguay's complaint that his execution would violate the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block the execution, in blatant violation of this country's in:ernational obligations.

And when a U.N. Special Rapporteur issued a report condemning racial discrimination in the application of the death penalty in the United States, Senator Jesse Helms responded with outrage that a U.N. official would dare to criticize our human rights record.

The USA Campaign must bring home to U.S. public officials- and to ordinary Americans-that people around the world are monitoring our record, and this is the way it should be. The whole international human rights framework, built from the ashes of the Holocaust, depends on universal scrutiny of human rights so that all persons are guaranteed these protections, no matter who they are or here they live.

We can count on our Amnesty collegues around the world to take action on the USA Campaign. We, in turn, must be ready to carry the campaign's message to every corner of these United States.

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