UNC Human Rights Convention

In the Community

Constitutional Convention will look at human rights

TO THE EDITOR:

What if we all had a right to livable wages or a right to leisure?

What if everybody was guaranteed the right to an adequate standard of living?

Our world today is much different from that at the time that the Constitution was originally drafted and we were granted our basic rights as citizens.

The complex society we live in, marked by great disparities in how people live and are treated, presents a need to re-evaluate our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and address rights that we should be entitled to.

Saturday, students from social and economic justice classes here at UNC will be hosting a mock Constitutional Convention, in which we will respectfully critique our Bill of Rights and draft new articles in an effort to open the door for human rights.

We encourage all students, staff and members of the community to join us this Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Manning 209.



Reine Duffy

Journalism
Senior

Forum addresses Constitution and human rights

Online Exclusive

By: Matthew Price, Staff Writer

Issue date: 12/3/07 Section: University

More than 200 years after the U.S. Constitution was drafted, a group of University students sought to create a new version of the "supreme law of the land."

But rather than focus on the relationships between states and the federal government, separation of powers or rights of individuals, the more than 30 student participants honed in specifically on human rights.

Sociology professor Judith Blau organized Saturday's event as a project for her Sociology 131 and 273 classes. She said the main purpose of the convention was to initiate conversations about American viewpoints on rights.

"When we see how other countries do human rights, we look at our own Constitution and see where we're behind," Blau said. "Human rights are in the air right now."

The convention lasted almost eight hours, alternating periods of student-proposed changes with discussions and guest lecturers, including Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy and Carborro Mayor Mark Chilton.

Proposed constitutional articles included the right to a living wage, the right to peace and the right to leisure. Other articles reiterated and expanded existing constitutional rights, such as privacy and free speech.

In addition to scheduled speeches, students heard impromptu lectures from local leaders such as Alan McSurely, an attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and national labor activist Ashaki Binta.

"The whole process of organizing the convention has been very fluid," said senior Bria Marcelo, one of the event's four student co-directors. "We expected today to be fluid, much like the original constitutional convention was."

Students and community guests filtered in and out of the Manning Hall room as the day progressed, with most students showing up for Foy's keynote speech at noon.

Foy addressed local progress toward human rights and stressed the importance of local activism - a contrast from the national focus of the first half of the convention.

"We already have a Constitution, and it's not always realized fully in what we do," Foy said. "There are two tracks: what are people doing with that they have and what are the new tools they need."

Both Foy and Chilton discussed the limited power of local government in North Carolina, where municipality powers must be specifically appropriated by the state's legislature.

But Chilton said he thought the day's discussion was ultimately important for affecting local rights.

"When you look at people in North Carolina's legislature, many of them are graduates of North Carolina colleges. Their views were shaped by what they learned there," Chilton said.

"By having these kinds of conversations now, we end up with change."



Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.

Thinking Internationally - Acting Locally

by Judith Blau

Americans ignored Martin Luther King when he urged that the civil rights movement broaden to become a human rights movement just as the nation earlier ignored FDR when he proposed a bold human rights framework for the US. Human rights are not part of the American psyche, are not part of our laws, are rarely mentioned in the media, and they are not in the US Constitution. To be sure, Civil and Political Rights are part of our Constitution, but these are citizens’ rights, not human rights. America had a short flirtation with human rights, in the disorienting post-World War II period. Europe was in ruins and America was magnanimous. Shortly after the UN was founded in 1945, a small committee was formed to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The US was supportive and the committee was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. The US signed the 1948 UDHR, not a legal treaty but a document of great international significance, still today.

The initial idea in 1948 was to redraft the UDHR as a treaty and send it out to states for their signatures and ratification, but the United States became increasingly adamant as the Cold War dragged on that it would not ratify a treaty that was such a bold challenge to the rights of capitalists. The UDHR advances civil and political rights as well as property rights, but it also encompasses social security, freedom from discrimination, and spells out certain rights - the right to work, to an adequate standard of living, to adequate food, to medical care, to assistance in old age, to special protections for mothers and children, and to education. The stalemate was finally broken when the UDHR was divided into two: International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The truth of the matter is that the US is party to neither. It uses a legal loophole so that its signature on the ICCPR is not binding (”not self executing”).

Students in my two classes this semester read the constitutions of other countries. In one class the focus was human rights (housing rights, gay and lesbian rights, rights of indigenous peoples, rights to peace, healthcare rights, rights of women, and so forth). In the other, the focus was labor rights (collective bargaining, decent pay, maternity leave, vacation with pay, and so forth). University of Richmond Law School provides online access to almost all state constitutions with English translations. Remarkably, most countries have recently revised and expanded their constitutional human rights provisions along the lines of international human rights law.

Empowered, the students decided to have a Mock Constitutional Convention where they would ceremoniously unfurl their nearly 60 Amendments they had written during the semester. We invited a few local leaders to join the conversation and to briefly speak - the Mayor of Chapel Hill, the Mayor of Carrboro, labor organizers from the University of North Carolina, NAACP members, and local activists. The two mayors are justifiably proud of their progressive cities. They have collective bargaining whereas the state and university do not. The residents of Carrboro recently voted to impeach Bush. Chapel Hill is one of the nation’s leading cities on green energy, and both mayors are pleased their municipalities advance the rights of gays and lesbians. Both mayors described their towns as having (their words) “human rights orientations.”

Is there a problem? You bet there is. Like all American cities Carrboro and Chapel Hill are plagued by human rights abuses: homelessness, inadequate health care, food insecurity, inadequate labor protections, low wages, long work hours, migrants who live in terror of raids, discrimination, obscene gaps between black and white incomes, and growing numbers without health insurance. Protection of farmers’ rights is incomplete as is realization of equality for African Americans and other minorities, and since human rights and environmental protections go hand in hand, it is imperative that the two cities cut carbon emissions, reduce reliance on private automobiles, and have race- and class-neutral policies for waste sites.

We have come full circle. Chapel Hill and Carrboro cities are situated in capitalist America, a nation where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is greater than any other industrialized country, a nation with the highest child poverty rates among all the OECD countries, and, indeed, the US has not ratified a single human rights treaty. Is it hopeless? Set this aside for a moment and consider that countries around the world, all mostly poor, all much poorer than the US, have revised their constitutions to embrace human rights. My next point has astonishing implications. An international network, People’s Movement for Human Rights Education, is assisting cities around the world to become Human Rights Cities. Most that have started pilot projects face far more complex challenges than any American city does, including deep, structural poverty (Timbuktu, Mali) and one, decades of civil war and genocide (Musha, Rwanda). Others in the network are in capitalist countries, including Winnipeg, Canada, and one American city, Eugene, Oregon is not in the network but models itself along similar lines.

Before we shrug and toss off the idea that American cities do not have the democratic capacity for such projects, we should recall that when Tocqueville came to America in 1831 he found communities to be animated, inclusive, and highly participatory. Because many American cities are still today potentially democratic, we can turn to them again to advance deeper forms of democracy and to propose they be Human Rights Cities. This requires building broad coalitions and partnerships, and beyond that, reaching out and involving all citizens as economic and social security expands and becomes universal, and as cultural and social pluralism more securely anchored.

Judith Blau teaches at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and is president of the US chapter of Sociologists without Borders.

Published on Thursday, December 6, 2007 by CommonDreams.org