Climate Crisis: Human Rights Implications
High Road for Human Rights is unique in that it addresses climate change within a human rights framework. Without aggressive action, including an end to construction of coal-burning power plants, our world will be a very different, far less hospitable, planet for our children and later generations. Hundreds of millions of people will be forced from their homes; draughts, floods and more extreme weather events will kill many people; water resources will disappear; and ocean life will be severely impacted. Help us organize people and teams, community-by-community, to protect our climate and prevent catastrophic human rights violations.
Genocide
The genocide in Darfur could have been stopped seven years ago, yet the killing, the rapes, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children continues. The missing element has been grassroots education and advocacy. Help High Road for Human Rights organize in communities in every state to help end the genocide by raising awareness about the challenges and, perhaps most importantly, the solutions we demand be pursued by our elected officials.
Slavery
High Road is elevating understanding throughout the nation about the horrors of slavery, including sexual slavery, with the objective of motivating people to advocate for far better international leadership by the US to reduce the suffering. Elected officials have proven that, without a call by the public for change, they are not going to effectively act to stop trafficking. Help High Road for Human Rights organize people to tenaciously demand changes in US policies and practices to stop the trafficking in human beings.
The Death Penalty
The great majority of countries in the world- 134 – have abolished the death penalty in law or in practice. Thirty five US states still have the death penalty, and only China, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia had more executions in 2009 than the United States. State-sanctioned killing is a flawed, biased, costly, and unnecessary punishment. High Road mobilizes groups nationwide to end state-sanctioned killing.
Torture and the Rule of Law
The torture and killing of dozens of people detained and hundreds of cases of cruel torture at the hands of US personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and elsewhere has been in blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Convention Against Torture. It is also a violation of statutes passed by the United States Congress, including the War Crimes Act of 1996 and the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998.
People around the world- reportedly over 100 of them- have been kidnapped by US agents, disappeared without any knowledge by their loved ones of what happened to them, and transported to other countries for imprisonment and torture. This immoral, illegal practice is referred to as the “extraordinary rendition program.” This CIA program was approved and justified by President Bush and others in his administration, with no accountability for their crimes. The Obama administration has continued to kidnap people and send them to other countries for interrogations and it has failed and refused to hold anyone accountable for past instances of torture.
When the US government officially sanctioned the kidnapping, disappearance, and torture of people (some of them innocent of any connection to terrorism), High Road for Human Rights successfully organized people and other organizations to push for change by the US Congress. Because of High Road’s work, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee held a ground-breaking hearing on abuses of executive power and the ways in which such abuses can be deterred in the future. High Road’s Executive Director testified at that hearing.