UNA-NCA Takes Action for Human Rights in DC

By Heather Hill, UNA-NCA Human Rights Committee Co-Chair

As we approach the 75th anniversary of the UN, I hope we all know by heart Eleanor Roosevelt’s powerful words,

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?

In small places, close to home.

Although as a country we no longer hold a leadership role on the human rights global stage, we are perhaps more primed and ready than ever to understand the importance of human rights and the vital role that individuals and civil society must play in order to keep them alive and valued and followed.

A more challenging question for civil society in the United States today, though, is how we participate in this process. What does or can it look like for individual citizens and local organizations to be part of keeping human rights alive and well?

This month marks one year since the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations Association of the National Capital Area (UNA-NCA) decided to find out.

Universal Periodic Reviews (UPRs) are a process of the UN Human Rights Council that reviews the human rights records of every single UN member state. They provide the opportunity for each state to show what they have done to improve the state of human rights in their countries and how they have fulfilled their human rights obligations. UPRs take place on a four and a half year cycle, and the United States is up for review this May.

Every UPR is officially comprised of a report compiled by the Office of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) along with a report by the country under review. However, each UPR also allows for reports from “other stakeholders,” including members of civil society. These peer reviews are typically referred to as “shadow reports” and frequently include information and points that are not included in the report submitted by the country in question.

For several years now, the Human Rights Committee of the UNA-NCA has hosted panel events around the UPRs of other countries, namely, China and Russia. As we approached the UPR of the United States, though, members of the committee wondered- is there more we can do?

The answer was a resounding yes — a yes that still reverberates through our committee agenda today.

In March of 2019, the UNA-NCA Human Rights Committee decided that we would conduct a local UPR on the state of human rights in DC — and that we would make it an open and educational process. We started with an event hosted by Bread for the City that addressed basic questions, including, “What is the UPR and what is the United Nations or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?”

At the end of that event, attendees worked together to list human rights issues that they, individually and collectively, believed were pressing issues in the district.

From there, that list was compiled into a non-scientific survey that was disseminated across DC through the networks of many local partners, generating the “top 3” issues that respondents believed faced local residents and needed to be addressed: DC Statehood, the right to housing, and economic inequality.

With these three issues identified, the committee proceeded to host a series of open-invitation roundtables across the city — one for each of the three issues — which started with a presentation by various partners and experts introducing the topics and ended with a workshopping by participants, identifying the unique challenges within each area and recommending actions for change.

As you may imagine, this was a massive undertaking and one that far exceeded the capacity of a volunteer-driven committee, so the UNA-NCA Human Rights Committee partnered with other organizations, specifically, the American Friends Service Committee, the D.C. Human Rights City Alliance, and The George Washington Law School International Human Rights Clinic to make it possible — not to mention the many organizations who opened their spaces for us to host the events or the speakers who presented.

Using the information gathered at the roundtables, a formal report on the state of human rights in DC was compiled and submitted as a shadow report to the United Nations in October.

But that was just the beginning.

With the paper submitted, the UNA-NCA Human Rights Committee shifted its focus from formulating the paper to presenting it back to the public and advocating the recommendations to embassies around the city, for while anyone can now read the report on the UN’s UPR website, none of the recommendations will necessarily make it into the formal list of recommendations provided to the USA in May 2020 unless countries specifically adopt them into their recommendations.

After hosting an event featuring Andrew Gilmour, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, along with Ambassador (ret.) Keith Harper, Former U.S. Representative to the United Nations Human Rights Council and Ambassador Sarah Mendelson, Distinguished Service Professor of Public Policy and Head of Heinz College in Washington, D.C., on Capitol Hill in late October on the US and Human Rights, the committee participated in a series of town hall events organized by US Human Rights Network in late January and February for consultations between civil society and UN Missions (NYC) and Embassies (DC), with UNA-USA activist and USHRN leader Josh Cooper and AFSC HR activist and the UNA-NCA HRC Co-Chair, Rachel Bergsieker, as facilitators and organizers. More of these events, open to UNA-NCA general membership following a special orientation, are planned for March and April.

UNA-NCA Human Rights Committee leadership also attended a consultation with the US Department of State US UPR NGO on January 27 at the DoS, preparatory to completion of the official US UPR submission to the UN in February. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Scott Busby presided over the consultation, with representatives of the Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Homeland Security on the panel of respondents to NGO questions and proposals.

Further preparation and promotion are now being conducted by UNA-NCA Human Rights Committee members and general membership volunteers, with help from GWU law students. This consists of preparing brief proposals based on the UNA-NCA shadow reports for possible recommendations to the US government at the US UPR in May 2020, with volunteers mobilized from the UNA-NCA Human Rights and Advocacy Committees, GWU Law School, and more, to organize and undertake visits to key country embassies identified in DC, to recommend that these embassies submit our action proposals to their governments and Geneva missions for possible proposal to the USG during the US UPR.

Not only that, but the UNA-NCA Human Rights Committee members are also undertaking a background paper on the US, the UN, and Human Rights that looks backwards and forwards towards the UN75 UN General Assembly conference in September 2020, and on March 24th, the committee will be hosting an event on “The United Nations and Human Rights in Washington, DC” at The George Washington University Law School Faculty Lounge.

For many of the members of the UNA-NCA Human Rights Committee, this has been a year of learning and growth. We started out vaguely aware of the UPR and determined to participate in a mechanism open to us that enables us to forward local human rights issues onto the global stage in a manner that can affect powerful change back in our community.

We have learned more about the UPR process than we, ordinary citizens and local or expat community members, could possibly have imagined. Human rights in this city have taken on a whole new perspective for us; in elevating them to a global level, they have become personal and actionable and opened new opportunities. In a time when we are wondering about the future of U.S. leadership on human rights issues, we have discovered that even people like us can have a voice and lead the charge towards change — and if we can do it, you can, too.

As a committee, we invite you to join us in our advocacy over these remaining two months leading up to the US UPR in Geneva. We also encourage you to join with us over the following months and years as we track the implementation of the recommendations that are made to the U.S., whether they contain the action items we put forward into our report or not.

It’s on us to lead the charge for the world we want to see. It’s on each of us to safeguard and advocate for our human rights. And if you want to do that with a group of civil society members dedicating our spare time to learning and growing and forwarding this; we invite you to join us. At risk of being too cliche, now is the time to be the change you want to see in the world.