Bringing Human Rights Home

On March 1 the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that the Constitution forbids executing juvenile offenders. In putting to death people who were minors when they committed their crime, the majority noted, "The United States now stands alone in a world that has turned its face against the juvenile death penalty." In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia attacked the majority's consideration of laws and practices outside the United States, saying that the consensus of "like-minded foreigners" had no bearing in understanding our own Constitution. One month later, in a speech to the American Society of International Law, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg responded that US courts should pay more attention, not less, to international norms. She added that "the notion that it is improper to look beyond the borders of the United States in grappling with hard questions has a certain kinship to the view that the US Constitution is a document essentially frozen in time as of the date of its ratification."

The increasingly noisy debate on the High Court over the proper role of international standards of justice in our domestic law and policy reflects a broader development that is gaining momentum around the country: Human rights are coming home. Advocates are discovering how the fight for justice and freedom here can be waged through human rights, the international ethical and legal standards that the United States helped to create more than fifty-five years ago and that it is officially committed to respect and uphold. In so doing, this emerging human rights movement is forced to confront deliberate, longstanding and nonpartisan policies aimed at insuring that human rights are reserved for external use only.

Unlike many governments, the United States never underestimated the power of human rights. Led by Eleanor Roosevelt, this country played a critical role in the adoption, on December 10, 1948, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which for the first time bound all governments to a common standard of conduct. Ever since then the United States has invoked human rights standards, often aggressively if highly selectively, to criticize other governments.

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