by JBA Chair of the Human Rights Law Section Michael Cavendish
When it was formed, the thesis behind our bar association’s section on human rights law was that human rights legal work, imagined as the work of specialists, is, in reality, 95 times of out 100, performed by, well, us.
The converse of this thesis is the idea that, equipped only with a mere interest toward taking on a human rights case or cause, every lawyer can be a capable human rights lawyer; or advocate, or researcher, or philanthropist.
What are human rights? The question eludes an unchallenged answer.
In 1948, the United Nations defined much of what human rights means to the public when it enacted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document based on a draft written by an American academic, Melville Herskovits.
The idea of human rights then flourished and then subsided in the popular mind until in 1961, when a lawyer, Peter Benenson of London, wrote a letter in a newspaper about six “prisoners of conscience” held in some benighted parts of the world.
From one lawyer’s single letter sprouted Amnesty International, the worldwide human rights advocacy group. And in the decades that followed, accepted notions of human rights took on new branches and special interests.
Today there is ongoing work toward human rights for women, children, refugees, writers, religion adherents, over legal procedure, capital punishment, concerning cultural heritage, and on and on.
We can quibble about what should be a human right and what shouldn’t, but usually we’re too busy to quibble, since some of the deprivations that give rise to a new human rights project are often incredibly backward or crude.
We might say that it would be an insult to all things medieval to label as such some of the predations still found today in the recesses of the strongholds of law.
In this vein, work on human rights is often surprisingly, and refreshingly, apolitical. One needn’t ask whether opposing a practice such as torturing, truly torturing someone accused of a nonviolent offense, is a liberal idea or a conservative idea.
Likewise, it comes as no surprise that everyone, everywhere is universally against the practice of locking an arrested person away without appearance and without formal charge. This was a cruelty supposedly solved by the right of habeas corpus within Magna Carta in 1215 A.D., yet observers agree that it persists today in one of the world’s most advanced economies.
There are domestic U.S. human rights cases in no short supply. Because of this, and because of the remarkable and cheapening telecommunicative, publishing, and photographic powers the new generation of smartphones and web tech bequeath to lawyers, it has never been easier than it is today to start a human rights project and begin making a difference.
Lawyers in 2011 have tools that the far-sighted Mr. Benenson, and indeed, that the highest echelons of the powers in 1947’s United Nations, were without. A lawyer need not travel and need not build a second office to take a turn as a human rights advocate or attorney. Sometimes all it takes to start is a modern cell phone.
Many lawyers doing human rights work confine themselves to what we can colloquially label “the really bad stuff,” e.g., genocidal murder, mass rape, human trafficking (sex slavery), extralegal imprisonment based on political crimes defined by juntas.
Few would split hairs with the urgency of ending affronts like these. But they are not everyone’s subject matter, and there are myriad other issues that are legitimately discussed under the HR umbrella which may be of keener interest to a lawyer starting out for human rights.
These might include prison conditions, fallout from immigration enforcement, worker and laborer conditions, et cetera. The range of potential issues within what we could call the catalog-able family of HR issues, contains, like the spectrum of nonprofit agencies we sometimes volunteer for, something for everyone.
What type of lawyer would be useful to a human rights client? I’ll list just three types:
• Veteran lawyers, those who have a fulsome quality to their ability to handle a file. These lawyers share a deep wellspring of ability to “make things happen” in the legal universe.
• Senior and retired lawyers, those gifted with wisdom and quite often, a yearning interest for finding resolutions to problems rather than mere abstract answers to issues laden with vocational exoticism.
• New lawyers, those gifted with the admirable optimism and almost limitless energy they carry in their age. They who hunger for experience, for action, for something “real,” some departure from the endless mocks and theoretical exams they trudged out while students.
Did I leave anyone out? It seems not. Today, every one of us can be a human rights lawyer.