A powerful documentary in the Washington Post on gun violence. Includes a portrait of Mary Jane Ledgerwood, Priest in charge, Grace Episcopal Church, The Plains:

Washington Post Mary Ledgerwood

Amidst the financial crisis of California, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has ruled that the government must reduce the amount of prisoners, as the overcrowding violates the ban on cruel and unusual punishment, reports the NYTimes.

A successful campaign to provide health care as a human right in Vermont, despite the fact that the United States have no intention of ratifying the Covenant for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: the Vermont Worker’s Center has accomplished the task of advocating for health care based on international obligations and its guiding principles, including: universality, equity, accountability, transparency and participation.

The Observer profiles the success of the Innocence Project , which so far has exonerated 260 people!

Jennifer Bartlett in a NYTimes Online column, “Assumptions” for city room blog describes her experience venturing through New York with cerebral palsy.

Micah Kellner, a NY assembly man, responded with the following letter:

Ordinary New Yorkers expect to be treated according to a simple standard of common courtesy and respect, and those of us with disabilities are no different. Yet too often we are confronted by strangers who make bizarrely inappropriate comments or offer unnecessary and unasked-for expressions of sympathy. There is a double standard here — as if we are not entitled to the same basic consideration taken for granted by others in their daily interactions.

Kellner stresses the importance of overcoming social barriers: “equality begins with respect for people’s differences, and with overcoming deep-seated preconceptions about people with disabilities.”

NYTimes columnist Judith Warner discusses the situation of persons with varying forms of depression in the United States of America. As a new  study finds that those who do get treaty do not get treated properly and many others receive no treatment at all, Warner holds: “This is the big picture of mental health care in America: not perfectly healthy people popping pills for no reason, but people with real illnesses lacking access to care; facing barriers like ignorance, stigma and high prices; or finding care that is ineffective.”

The effect of social barriers, such as stigma and ignorance cannot be overestimated. Equally, access to affordable quality health care – a human right – is fraught for many around the globe.

In early December the United States of America reached an agreement with a string of American Indian tribes who had been battling the government’s faulty practices towards them by way of a class action since 1996. The statement by President Obama did not focus on offering an apology but did venture to state that it was “an important step towards a sincere reconciliation.”

The Child Rights Convention is the only UN human rights treaty with almost universal ratification – save the USA and Somalia. As the AP reports, representatives in the US House are staging opposition to the possibility of ratification, citing the potential “erosion” of parental rights.

“A child’s ‘right to be heard’ would allow him (or her) to seek governmental review of every parental decision with which the child disagreed”; and “Children would have the ability to choose their own religion while parents would only have the authority to give their children advice about religion,” Representative Hoekstra is said to fear.

As Fred Kaplan reports in Slate, one of the first memoranda by President Barack Obama is a “restoration of the purpose” of the Freedom of Information Act. The Memorandum states, inter alia, “A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency,” and: “The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.”

One of the issues one may easily forget is the dismissal of several judges in the Bush administration, which ultimately led to the resignation of the  Attorney-General, Gonzalez. As the LATimes reports, the political apointee in charge of supervising the career lawyers in the Justice Department’s civil and voting rights divisions, referred to his staff as “commies,” “crazy libs,” and reportedly confided in a friend that “he hoped to get rid of the “Democrats” and “liberals” because they were “disloyal” and replace them with “real Americans” and “right-thinking Americans.” 

Relieving to read an unrelated story in Slate about the history of Supreme Court Presidents – who preside over the inauguration – and Presidents of the United States. The piece highlights the fact that the Chief Justice who swore in Lincoln, Roger Brooke Taney, stated in Dred Scott v. Sanford that blacks were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Lincoln obviously opposed the decision. Obama and Roberts start out on opposite ground: Obama voted against Chief Justice Roberts.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has put together a catalogue of actions necessary to restore “freedom”, particularly in the realm of civil and human rights. 

In this vein one may also want to read the Open Letter written by Julie Mertus, Professor of Human Rights at American University, to President-Elect Barack Obama, published by truthout. Mertus among others calls on Obama to repair the US’ relationship with UN human rights bodies by reaffirming the committment to the UN human rights framework, to investigate all acts that gave – and give – the impression of the US being above international law, and to sign as well as implement some of the international human rights treaties such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a convention signed by every country in the world except for the United States and Somalia, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

In a year that saw important elections and a lot of results that were not followed – see Zimbabew below as a stark example – it is interesting to see that the famously infamous decision of the US Supreme Court eight years ago on George W. Bush v Al Gore, despite the Court’s own pledge that it shall not constitute precedent, is increasingly making the rounds as a reference case. Read Adam Liptak’s NYTimes piece here.

In an Editorial the NYTimes responds to the Report by the US Senate’s Armed Services Committee and calls for an independent panel to look at the egregious violations of both national and international law to restore the rule of law to adequate levels: “It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War.” The officials “issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions.”

An interesting piece on the decreasing caseload of the US Supreme Court. Apparently it is ten times easier to get admitted to Harvard than have your case heard by “the nine,” according to Adam Chandler. Curiously, a  timely letter from civil society organizations can sway things towards a writ of certioari – a hearing at the Supreme Court.

Politics & religion are the two issues one is not to raise at a dinner table. So, good that Colin Powell made the following statement in a Sunday morning television interview, which was generally widely reported. However, the following, regrettably necessary, statement was not covered as widely as it should be:

“Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. That’s not America. Is there something wrong with a seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion that he is a Muslim and might have an association with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.”

Truthout reports possible manipulation of voter registration in Ohio: mailings with notices about absentee ballot applications and related important information might be “returned to sender” faster than usual. This is disturbing, also in light of the disturbing report by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s on the 2004 election in Ohio.

Poignantly, an Anonymous reader at truthout shared the following: 

Memories ! This essay takes me back to August 1934 in Germany, when I was an almost 14-year old boy listening from a concealed place in the basemewnt of our schoolhouse to Nazi Storm-Troopers “counting” the ballots in the then “plebiscite” engendered by Hitler to overcome the strictures of the then German “Weimar” Constitution. I heard one Storm trooper tell his underlings that “We have to make it come out so that there will be fourteen “NO” votes, because that’s how many Jews voted today”. And that is how it came out, of course. When I told a Jewish neighbor what I had heard, he smiled sardonically and said, “I knew they would do something like that, so I voted for Hitler, just to prove it”. 
The Ohio story and others like it always remind me of that long-ago fatal time. And what are the “legal” dodges we are up against now in this “land of the free and the home of the brave “?