Ideas & Action Building a Human Rights Agenda

In many parts of the world, particularly in the Global South, utilizing human rights discourse is intertwined with collective efforts for progressive social justice. In the United States, however, the utilization of human rights language by organizations and individuals seems to be largely disconnected from leftist politics and/or social justice work. Our research aims to understand why that is and how progressive activists and organizers in the Boston area interact with human rights discourse.

Our interviews with 51 individuals associated with 42 organizations in the Boston area explores the ways activists and organizers utilize the human rights framework (explicitly and/or implicitly) in their work, their rationale for these decisions, and what limitations and opportunities they perceive around engaging the human rights framework for broad coalition building and advancement of their organizational missions. This document is a summary of a much longer research report, which three graduate students in sociology at Boston College conducted in conjunction with outreach for a human rights conference entitled Boston Human Rights: Ideas and Action to be held on Thursday July 31, 2008.

1-The authors are graduate students in sociology at Boston College. For a copy of the full paper, please email mlwhite@bc.edu.
2-THIS IS A SUMMARY. PLEASE DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION-- mlwhite@bc.edu
3-A formatted version of this summary with footnotes can be downloaded from here.

BOSTON HUMAN
RIGHTS: IDEAS AND ACTION

SUMMARY
OF RESEARCH RESULTS

Amy Finnegan, Adam Saltsman, Shelley White¹

\

HUMAN RIGHTS: UNDERSTANDING
THE AMERICAN CONTEXT

The US can be characterized
as having exercised a dualistic role related to the human rights movement.
By supporting the establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (UDHR) in the late 1940’s and ratifying the ICCPR (International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) in 1966, the US distinguished
itself as a founding contributor and champion of the human rights framework.
However, during the second half of the 20^th century, the
United States in the implementation of its foreign and domestic policy
was one of the world’s primary violators of international human rights
standards. Moreover, it has ratified with reservations or completely
failed to ratify a number of important human rights conventions such
as the Convention on the Rights of the Child; two optional protocols
of the ICCPR, 1967 and 1969; International Covenant on Economic, Social
and Cultural Rights. (ICESCR); the Convention on the Elimination of
All Forms of Discrimination against Women, 1981, and its optional protocol,
2000; and the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights
of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, 2003.

So, the US has both heritages
– it has been a founding contributor and champion of the human rights
framework, and has also undermined its legitimacy, adoption, and application.

Furthermore, beyond a lack
of legal commitment and political will, some have highlighted more subtle,
though still potent, cultural barriers to realizing a commitment to
global human rights in the US, including American exceptionalism, individualism,
and beliefs in meritocracy. At the same time, there are
strong arguments in favor of overcoming these obstacles to realize a
commitment to and application of the framework within the US.
Such a movement would require advances at legal and political levels,
as well as transformation at cultural levels. Social justice and
political activists and organizers are an important piece of shaping
the direction of US-based activities related to human rights.
This research speaks to these calls to action in examining the ways
activists and organizers perceive challenges and opportunities around
human rights. It aims to understand the extent to which the framework
resonates with their models of change. It aims to understand whether
there is perceived synergy between the human rights framework and employed
strategies and traditions of organizing and mobilizing broad constituencies
in the American context.

In this section of the full
paper, you will find an historical overview of the human rights movement
and America’s dualistic role in relationship to it. This section
also highlights some seminal questions regarding the utility of the
human rights framework domestically and internationally. This
literature review sets the stage for our research into how contemporary
American activists relate to the human rights framework.

INTERVIEW PROCESS

We completed interviews with
51 individuals representing 42 organizations. An inclusive list of the
organizations represented is given below, in Table 1, by issue focus
area, extent of explicit use of the human rights framework, and designation
as a community and/or advocacy organization. One interview, with
a long time human rights expert and activist, is not included in this
summary as his work is with a broad-based human rights organization.
It should be noted that while we label organizations as affiliated primarily
with one issue, many of the organizations have multiple issues of focus.
Furthermore, we chose to distinguish organizations based on whether
they were community-based or advocacy in nature, though many engaged
both approaches. Thus, with each distinction, we did our best
to convey the true nature of the organizations represented, though our
system is not perfect. Finally, we distinguish those organizations
that explicitly use the human rights framework in their work – that
is, they have included clear and consistent reference to human rights
in at least one major campaign – and those that have not.

POLITICS AND HUMAN RIGHTS
IN THE UNITED STATES

The deep and complex relationship
that the United States has had with the human rights framework denies
it the possibility of remaining apolitical. While the UN conventions
are merely to be used as a tool in the affirmation of the dignity of
all human beings, the reader can see from the above sections, that human
rights is and has since its inception been contested terrain.
In a straightforward way, it should only be a matter of ratifying UN
agreements for the human rights discourse to be adopted within a society.
However, as the reader can see from the section above, from their formation
and in their implementation, these documents cannot avoid a political
identity; an identity that the reader will find often acts as a limitation
to the human rights framework’s utility in the United States among
grassroots organizers. Whether it is having their roots in Western liberalism,
their being dominated by primarily two Cold War hegemons, or the invocation
of their articles and protections to justify imperial military intervention—half
of our respondents cited some political limitation to the human rights
approach. Often remarks about the political nature of human rights
came hand in hand with comments about the limitations of this approach
as a strategy for mobilizing communities on social justice issues.
Thus among several of our respondents, their perceptions of the political
nature of human rights serve as limitations to their utility. In this
section of the full paper, we describe some of the ways the politicization
of human rights in the United States comes to pose a challenge to using
this frame for organizing campaigns of social, cultural, political,
and economic change.

Twelve out
of forty-two organizations across nine issues think of human rights
as left of center, while only two feel that it represented a right of
center position, and five feel that human rights can be associated with
either right or left, depending on the situation (see Table 5 in a later
part of the discussion). Looking at Table 3, the reader will note
that we have grouped respondents’ comments into four different categories
of political limitations that they feel deter them from considering
human rights as a viable approach to their work. These particular
categories of limitations were created inductively from respondent interviews.
We coded the transcripts and grouped similar codes together in order
to arrive at the four categories listed below in Table 3. Table
4 shows the same political limitations divided by issue focus per organization.

Table 5 below shows the various
ways interviewees associated human rights with a particular political
movement or party. Respondents did not always refer to human
rights as being something affiliated with the left or the right.
In many instances, they associate human rights with no political movement
or feel that it is a discourse dominated by those in power.

SOCIO-CULTURAL LIMITATIONS
TO A HUMAN RIGHTS APPROACH

Within the broader US public,
cultural limitations to the embracement of human rights are well known
and have been discussed earlier in this paper. The general American
hesitancy to invoke human rights incorporates notions of American social
Darwinism, meritocracy, and isolationism. However, for the American progressive
activist community who has, over the years, built up a critique of each
of these myths of American conservatism, one might expect to find a
ready support of human rights, at least on the cultural and cognitive
level. Yet, through our interviews, we found that among activists
and organizers, cultural limitations to the human rights framework exist
as well.

While our respondents did indeed
critique the US cultural narratives mentioned above, many noted that
such widespread public belief in these myths serves as a deterrent against
using a human rights strategy. None of the respondents we interviewed
actually believe that the United States is a meritocracy or that those
living in poverty should be blamed for their socio-economic status.
Nevertheless, a number of the respondents (19%) representing eight organizations
feel that the broader US public so strongly resonates with these cultural
narratives that a human rights framework would lack a sufficient support
base. Interesting to note, five out of the eight represented organizations
who felt this way come from the health field (see Table 7), nearly two-thirds
of the health organizations. Others who cited these narratives as limitations
come from the fields of gender, labor, and peace/war—one organization
from each field.

Activist and organizer responses
also reflect a variety of ways that a human rights approach to activism
does or does not intersect with organizational missions or personal
ideas of what it means to work for social change in the context of the
United States. Whether they are concerned about the broader public conception
or whether they personally do not resonate with a human rights approach,
it is likely that in the United States, a variety of limitations that
are distinctly social and cultural prevent a widespread reliance on
human rights as a change-making device.

Table 6 shows some of the perceived
socio-cultural limitations to a human rights approach, and Table 7 reflects
the same limitations but is organized by issue area.

FRAMING

Building on what we have already
laid out on the political and cultural dimensions of utilizing a human
rights approach in the United States, this next section provides a more
intimate analysis of how the activists we spoke with discussed the viability
of utilizing a human rights frame for their particular organization.
In the full paper, we begin by outlining some of the major social movement
literature on framing and in particular, several recent empirical studies
on the use of a human rights frame with progressive activist organizations
located in the Global North. We then turn to the key findings from
our interviews that are related to frames. These themes can be
categorized into a discussion on whom is using the human rights frame
and secondly, what the perceived underlying assumptions of the human
rights frame are. After outlining these key findings, we will
briefly discuss alternatives to the human rights frame that our interviewees
use. We then begin a more comprehensive discussion on audiences where
a human rights frame resonates as well as current uses and applications
of a human rights frame. Finally, we will conclude this section
by exploring the potential for a human rights frame in future progressive
activist work.

Overall, eight of the nineteen
advocacy groups (42%) and six of the twenty-three community-based groups
(26%) we interviewed explicitly mentioned using a human rights language/approach
in their work. These figures point to two interesting matters,
which we wish to highlight here. First, is the distinction made between
organizations with a community-base and those with a more macro advocacy
scope. This is a differentiation that many of the activists we
spoke with highlighted in responding to our inquiries. One environmental
justice activist specified that for community base building groups like
his, the main concern is not policies but rather that frameworks must
“come out of conversation and dialogue around the community.”
Another activist from a community-base group working on a wide range
of issues, including housing and immigration, told us that she feels
that her group didn’t use much of a framework at all, rather they
are simply responding to what is articulated by the members of their
organization as needs in the community. The second matter
that our analysis points to is a general tendency for advocacy based-groups
to be more likely to explicitly use a human rights approach than groups
with a strong community-base. For a handful of the community-based
organizations with which we spoke, a human rights frame has simply not
yet been explored or utilized. Several such groups mentioned that
while they hadn’t consciously made a choice to steer away from a human
rights approach, it simply wasn’t language that they had organically
conceived.

Since two-thirds (twenty-eight
of the forty-two organizations) of the groups we interviewed did not
use human rights as their primary frame for their organization’s work,
we probed them for what alternatives they had utilized and found successful.
Compiling all of the interviews, the following themes emerged as alternative
frames across the organizations: utilitarian frames, moral/values claims
frames, social justice frames, civil rights or basic rights frames,
and frames specific to the particular issues that the organizations
were built around. Table 8 outlines the alternative frames that
activists in the particular issue areas choose to utilize for making
their claims and carrying out their organization’s work.

In order to more thoroughly
comprehend how progressive activist organizations in the United States
strategically decide whether or not a human rights frame would be viable
for their work, we asked the groups we interviewed to identify which
audiences and constituencies they thought a human rights frame is most
resonant with. The question produced a heterogeneous list of responses,
with some groups voicing opinions in direct contradiction with other
groups, such as whether or not a human rights frame would work with
religious communities or communities of people of color. Amidst
the wide array of divergent responses to this inquiry, several groups
feel the same about a few groups such as how human rights would work
with the medical community, progressive people with a social justice
framework, and young people. There also seemed to be some
consensus, although nuanced around the resonance of human rights with
legislators and policy-makers. Table 9 summarizes the findings
around which audiences are perceived to resonate with human rights.

Alongside the three groups
identified as audiences that are resonant with human rights, there were
several constituencies that were contested in terms of whether or not
a human rights frame would be viable with them. In Table 9, one
can observe that these contested audiences include legislators, the
American public more broadly, working class/poor and communities of
color, religious communities and donors. Some activists feel strongly
that these particular groups of people would connect with human rights
while others said this same group would not connect with a human rights
frame. The fact that there were several contested audiences seems
to suggest that most enclaves of people in the US are not inherently
receptive (or not receptive) to a human rights frame. This
may be likely because the human rights frame has not been pervasive
in American society to date. If an activist group is interested
in the potential of the human rights frame for their work, it may just
have to try it out and tweak it along the way, since there is no concrete
data on constituencies which with it will definitely resonate.

We also wish
to highlight several specific examples of uses of a human rights frame.
The following are express applications of a human rights frame that
the activists we spoke with mentioned as either historical examples
or contemporary examples, which they were involved with personally.

Activists have used a human
rights frame:

• to advocate for
  trans-gender rights with legislators
• in the 80s for the
  Homes for All Campaign
• to counter a market/cost
  analysis advanced by corporations (for environmental justice work)
• to teach workshops
  for workers to see their issues as related to dignity
• for comparative
  purposes (comparing US to other countries)
• to support direct
  action such as hunger strikes, etc.
• to work on international
  economic order issues in South Africa & Haiti
• to prevent the sale
  of arms to human rights abusing regimes
• for education &
  organizing generally
• to hold governments
  accountable in court
• to guarantee housing
  when local/state laws are not sufficient
• to use in court
  during the Plougshare trials
• as the foundation
  for the World Social Forum
• for campaign on
  immigrants rights to interpretive services

POTENTIAL AND OPPORTUNITIES
OF A HUMAN RIGHTS FRAME

Despite all of the limitations
and cautions raised about utilizing a human rights frame in the US context
today, many of the activists we interviewed also talked about the potential
of a human rights approach, highlighting many of the opportunities that
such a framework offers. More specifically, fifteen of the forty-two
organizations, about 36% (in each of the nine issue areas except for
housing), explicitly noted that they feel their organization is making
a shift towards a human rights approach. This shift towards a
human rights approach among several organizations led many interviewees
to comment on particular opportunities they saw for utilizing it in
their future progressive activist work in Boston. In this section,
we present the central findings from our study related to the potential
opportunities of a human rights frame. Table 10 illustrates the broad
themes associated with the opportunities of human rights as a framework
for future progressive activist work.

HUMAN RIGHTS CITY

In addition to the conceptual
inquiries on human rights which we have already summarized, we also
engaged participants on the idea of human rights cities during
our interviews.² Below are listed some of their responses.
Though we did not compile this data into tables that show the percentage
of respondents who feel a particular way about human rights cities,
the codes listed below give some examples of feedback given related
to the idea of a human right city and its potential application in Boston.
We have included them here to provide some springboard for the discussion
to be held on July 31, 2008 at Boston Human Rights: Ideas & Action.

• Need to be careful
  of process – once enshrined, it is hard to change
• Would be cool to
  have that framework as an organizer
• Would have to come
  from the youth and the people in the city
• It would have to
  have an enforcement mechanism, otherwise just another piece of paper
• Maybe a partner
  city that benefits?
• Could have constituency
  support
• Need suggestions
  at environmental, legislative, and programmatic levels
• How to finance
  it?
• Could work in Massachusetts
• Would get media
  attention
• Would need to challenge
  some basic assumptions (i.e. assimilation)
• The mayor of Boston
  is not somebody we want to work with or feel we can work with
• What about federal
  and state laws that supersede municipal laws?
• History: 15 years
  ago, Boston City Council passed resolution to not do any business with
  Burmese government officials because of human rights violations. It
  was struck down; we need to make sure any effort now goes beyond the
  symbolic
• “Human Rights
  City” peeks my interest because of the name
• Concern that it
  leaves out ecology issues?
• History: Cambridge
  Peace Commission is an interesting example of local government having
  a role to play in international peace/justice issues; also Mayors for
  Peace
• Interested because
  an opportunity to organize/network and achieve smaller victories on
  a local level
• It is useful for
  immigration issues and reframing the “illegal” question
• One activist mentioned
  a similar project happening in New Haven, where residents can voluntarily
  become residents of a new city so immigrants can get bank accounts etc.—similar
  to how Cambridge & Chelsea declared themselves “sanctuary cities”
• There would have
  to be a big educational component in terms of explaining to the residents
  of the city how human rights impacts them.
• More interest if
  mass-based groups like ACE & City Life are involved
• Possibility to link
  to trainings that are being organized as result of the Radical Organizing
  Conference in March (some ideas for a proposed workshop theme: what
  does a human rights frame mean? What has been the historical battle
  between a civil rights frame and an economic & social rights frame?
  Why didn’t the US endorse the social & economic rights?)
• Make sure its not
  just perceived as relevant to only certain neighborhoods of Boston