Preamble

AFFIRMING that respect for the inherent dignity and inalienable rights of every human being is the foundation of justice, freedom, and peace, within our local communities, in our country as a whole, and among nations;

MINDFUL that human rights law, developed in response to the atrocities inflicted on civilian populations during the Second World War, embodies the international community’s acceptance of a shared obligation to secure the rights of all persons, especially members of marginalized and persecuted groups;

RECOGNIZING that equal respect for the rights of every human being is the founding principle of American democracy, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, echoed in the words and actions of our most respected leaders, and reaffirmed through the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;

DRAWING GUIDANCE from the understanding of Mahatma Gandhi that “poverty is the worst form of violence”, and of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that “if a [person] doesn’t have a job or an income, [s]he has neither life, nor liberty, nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness”;

DENOUNCING the multiple forms of economic and social exclusion that divide Americans from each other and undermine solidarity within our society and our communities;

CONVINCED that unequivocal respect for all human rights is in the interest of every American and of our nation as a whole;

WE, the undersigned representatives, hereby declare the following:

Human Rights and International Standards: A Promise Made

Human rights are universal and indivisible. Their realization requires guarantees for all persons—regardless of race, gender, class, age, sexual orientation, disability, immigration, language or other status—of the complete set of rights: civil, political, economic, social, and cultural.

These principles are grounded in the founding documents of human rights, which include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), unanimously ratified by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, and the twin principal and widely ratified human rights treaties – the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Human rights have become the cornerstone of the international political and moral order, and are embodied in a wide array of institutions and practices, which seek the collective betterment of humankind, the equitable distribution of the fruits of progress, and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.

The meaning of human rights, however, emerges primarily through the ongoing struggle by individuals and communities to articulate and claim their rights; a process which needs greater support from advocacy groups, jurists, legal scholars, and courts.

This evolving process of rights-claiming has led to an international consensus on human rights standards. With respect to economic, social, and cultural human rights, this includes the following:

Human Rights in the United States: A Promise Unfulfilled

The United States played a key leadership role in the development of international human rights standards. Eleanor Roosevelt, as U.S. representative to the United Nations and President of the Commission on Human Rights, was one of the principal architects of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UDHR was strongly influenced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “economic bill of rights” and his doctrine of the “four freedoms”—freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, and freedom from want.

Since that time, however, the United States government has abandoned this historic commitment, acting to undermine their universal application both at home and abroad. In particular, the United States has vigorously opposed the realization of economic and social rights, claiming that such rights are merely “aspirational”, and that governments should not be held accountable for guaranteeing them. Using its global power and prestige to block the development of economic and social rights, the United States has undermined the dignity and well-being of countless poor persons around the world.

The United States has also consistently resisted the application of human rights standards at home by:

Failing to ratify crucial international human rights treaties, including the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights;
Allowing the continued marginalization of communities of color in social and economic life, even after dismantling legal segregation in response to the national struggle for civil rights;
Increasing economic inequalities by shifting resources from poor and working people to our most affluent citizens through budget and tax policies;
Directly attacking the notion of economic security as a fundamental right through the welfare reforms of the mid-1990s.

The United States government’s withdrawal from its visionary commitment to human rights affects every American, but the costs fall heaviest on the poor and disadvantaged. The United States is the world’s richest country in aggregate terms, yet:

The richest 1% of American households control 40% of the national wealth while 80% of the population controls less than 20% of the national wealth – the most extreme levels of economic inequality of any highly industrialized country;
20% of children under five live in poverty, the highest child poverty rate of any highly industrialized nation;
10% of Americans face food insecurity, including 13 million children;
40 million Americans lack health insurance, millions more are underinsured, and infant mortality is higher than in any other highly industrialized nation, although US expenditures on health care per capita are the highest in the world;
2 million Americans are homeless, including an increasing percentage of families;
Growing sectors of society experience unemployment, underemployment, and exploitative temporary work arrangements – over 70% of disabled Americans of working age are unemployed;
Americans work longer hours than any other highly industrialized country – including Japan;
1.8 million Americans lost jobs due to lay-offs in 2001, with workers in particular industries facing mass-layoffs – over 300,000 jobs lost in the telecommunications industry alone;
More people are incarcerated than anywhere else in the world, disenfranchising millions of citizens through the criminal justice system, including a disproportionate percentage of people of color;
40 to 44 million Americans are functionally illiterate, urban and rural schools are inadequately resourced, and more than one in ten students leave school before graduating from high school.

This abject failure to protect economic, social and cultural rights affects us all: deepening internal rifts within society; feeding a cycle of insecurity and incarceration; degrading the quality of our democracy; and betraying the vision of a genuinely inclusive, responsive, and participatory society embodied by leaders like President Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Dr. Martin Luther King.

Therefore, we, the undersigned, make the following:

Call to Action

Recognizing the historic and continuing consequences of the United States’ failure to fulfill its human rights obligations, we call upon the government to adopt the following measures:

Ratify, without reservations, the major human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights;

Adopt legislation and regulations at all levels of government implementing the standards set forth in the major human rights treaties;

Prohibit legislation that violates human rights standards or undermines the public sector’s ability to protect rights, in particular where deregulation or privatization deprives the public of access to essential services;

Prioritize the realization of human rights in budgetary processes, tax policies, and other resource allocations at the national and community levels;

Promote national awareness of and commitment to human rights through a process of public discourse and engagement;

Develop national plans, with full public participation, to achieve progressively the full realization of all human rights, with particular emphasis on the following:

Regarding the right to education: redress the imbalances in resources, facilities, and personnel which deny children in numerous low-income public school districts their right to an adequate education; immediately increase funding to public universities and the community college system to provide equal opportunity to higher education and establish a national program to provide free high-quality higher education; ensure that students at all levels have access to educational materials and facilities appropriate to their cultural, ethnic, and linguistic traditions; ensure that disabled and special needs children have access to appropriate learning environments; incorporate disabled adults into the planning and supervision of educational programs for disabled children; recognize the importance of sign language as the medium for communication among Deaf people and make provisions to ensure that all Deaf people have access to education in their national sign language; expand job training and vocational skill-building programs, in order to help young people enter the workforce and more mature workers adapt to shifts in a rapidly changing economy; expand education and job training programs for prisoners and persons recently released from federal or state correctional facilities; incorporate human rights education as a standardized component of primary and secondary school curricula;
Regarding the right to health: seek short-term means to guarantee access to health care for the nearly 40 million Americans without health insurance; develop and implement a national plan to provide affordable prescription medicines to all Americans; fully fund public hospitals and clinics, particularly those that serve economically disadvantaged areas; ensure full provision of trained interpreters for language minorities and the Deaf seeking medical services; guarantee access to effective substance abuse treatment and recovery programs, especially for low-income women; increase funding for research and treatment of diseases disproportionately affecting the poor; in the long term, initiate and carry through the development of a national health plan to secure access to a robust level of preventive and curative health care for all persons living in the United States;
Regarding the right to housing: frame an inclusive, long-term national plan to guarantee adequate housing for all citizens and residents of the United States; immediately develop mechanisms to prevent homelessness; expand construction and redevelopment in order to increase the available stock of decent, affordable low- and middle-income housing; ensure that a significant portion of new and renovated housing is accessible to people with all types of disabilities;
Regarding the right to food: make food distribution to those currently suffering from hunger a national priority; expand existing nutrition programs, particularly those serving children; simplify access to food assistance programs and eliminate any form of stigma attached to using such services;
Regarding the right to work: ensure that all Americans are given the opportunity, and the necessary skills to engage in productive work; guarantee that all workers receive a genuine living wage adequate to support themselves and their families for a work week not exceeding forty hours; ensure affordable, accessible and high-quality childcare for working parents; protect the right to work under safe and dignified conditions; guarantee necessary workplace accommodations in the case of disabilities, including physical modifications, assistive devices, flexibility in work policies and procedures, and availability of support services such as sign language interpretation; prohibit mandatory overtime; ensure that injured workers are swiftly and adequately compensated and provided sufficient means to lead a dignified life; provide public transportation options for poor and working people in order to expand their opportunities for training and employment; guarantee that products and services (both imported and domestic) sold in the United States are produced under humane, non-exploitative working conditions and with respect for operative international accords on workers’ rights, fair wages, and workplace safety;
Regarding the right to social security: institute policies to provide a basic minimum income sufficient to guarantee a dignified life for all Americans, including retired persons, persons with disabilities, and those experiencing unemployment or underemployment; restore, in an adapted, expanded, and improved form, the social and economic safety net protections eliminated by the welfare “reforms” of the 1990s;
Regarding the right to participate in cultural life: act vigorously to ensure that the country’s domestic security agenda does not result in further marginalization and persecution of ethnic, religious, and cultural minorities in the United States; protect the right of linguistic minorities to preserve and enjoy their unique languages, providing linguistic interpretation wherever required so that members of these communities can access social services, discharge their political responsibilities, express the wealth of their respective cultures, and take part fully in public life.

Broadly, we call upon the United States government to publicly acknowledge that the greatness of a country is accurately measured not by its military victories and the personal fortunes of its wealthiest citizens, but by the degree to which all its citizens and residents are able to freely exercise their economic, social, cultural, civil, and political rights, and to flourish within a just society mindful of the good of all persons, including the weakest and most vulnerable.

Embracing these principles as members of civil society, we, the undersigned, make the following:

Declaration of Commitment

Working within our communities, and through the growing national and international human rights movements, we commit ourselves to:

Promote recognition and respect for human rights, in particular economic, social, and cultural rights, at all levels;

Educate communities in the use of the human rights framework in organizing and activism;

Support local struggles to claim and giving meaning to economic, social, and cultural rights;

Use the language and substance of human rights to build connections among our diverse communities and agenda, while linking local concerns and claims to wider national and international movements;

Fortify our common commitment to the protection of economic, social, and cultural rights – not as a matter of charity, but as an obligation of our elected leaders to uphold the values which the community of peoples and nations has recognized as politically, legally, and morally binding.

Endnotes

1. Additional information about the campaign can be found at www.kwru.org.