Thirty years ago, following the Fourth UN World Conference on Women and as the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights approached, elements of civil society in the United States coalesced around an idea to build a movement for human rights in the United States. Change-agents within philanthropic foundations and donor collaboratives invested heavily in grassroots organizations around the country to educate and organize under the banner of “human rights.” Grasstops organizations were shaped in turn by transformational voices demanding they expand their scope to include new issues and focus more intently on the United States as a site of human rights violations. Urban welfare recipients, borderland immigrant communities, non-unionized workers in the South, and survivors of gender-based violence were among the populations that mobilized behind the idea. In 1999, a cohort of twenty-two movement leaders gathered in Mill Valley, California to dream about a unifying formation to cohere a national agenda.

US civil society geared up for robust participation at the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism and returned to a country transformed by the 9/11 terror attacks. In order to check the abuse of state power with which the “global war on terror” became synonymous, advocates sought new legal and political venues to prosecute their cases against the US government. International human rights mechanisms provided one novel space for documentation, litigation, and advocacy. The invasion of Iraq further exposed the excesses of US exceptionalism inherent in a campaign of violence and occupation justified as democracy promotion, heightening the contradictions that were always apparent to Indigenous Peoples, to people of African descent, to immigrant communities, to the poor and the working class, to women, and to queer people, among other affected  and targeted groups in the United States.

The 2003 launch of the US Human Rights Network represented a culmination and a new beginning: a major initiative to build a people-centered movement composed of organizations from across the country and spanning issue areas; the kind of Big Tent approach envisioned at Mill Valley. The Network would be a vehicle for expanding domestic educational efforts and organizing national delegations to advocate for human rights at the international level. Opportunities to participate in multilateral human rights forums, like UN treaty body reviews, created additional space for civil society leaders and mobilizers to educate, organize, and document–later leveraging their participation in the media to raise awareness for their claims and apply pressure to federal as well as state and local decision makers. Appearances before international bodies served as unique moments to further unsettle ideas about US exceptionalism, and attempt to reshape the narrative and raise the cultural and political consciousness of the audience. Shadow reporting at the United Nations took root as a key practice and tool for maintaining international engagement, building networks of transnational solidarity, and creating a running chronicle of the experiences of people living under cruelty within US territories. The Network adopted a people-centered human rights approach that prioritized the leadership and expertise of frontline and directly-impacted communities.

Campaigns to “bring human rights home” sought to reframe how the United States thought of itself. Messaging grounded criticism of the US government as failing to uphold its obligations under international law, reminding leaders at all levels of government that the nation-state was indeed embedded in an international community constituted by norms, principles, and shared beliefs. Human rights abuses could no longer be something we care about only when they happen “over there.” They are happening right here, right now. 

President Barack Obama’ election provided an opening to advance human rights in the US while a former community organizer and an avowed internationalist occupied the White House. When the killings of Trayvon Martin and then Michael Brown, Jr., sparked civil unrest, radical interventions flowed to the United Nations. Frontline protestors from the movement for Black lives and family members of those killed by racist violence gave testimony in the austere halls of Geneva, Switzerland, activating formal spaces for radical, emancipatory purposes. And this wasn’t the first time. Back in the early UN period, towering figures like WEB DuBois and Paul Robeson advocated at the international level with pathbreaking work, including the 1951 document, “We Charge Genocide.” When young people from Chicago testified in Geneva on behalf of their friend, Damo Franklin, who was tased to death by Chicago PD in 2014, they adopted the moniker - We Charge Genocide - conscious of the legacy to which they were heirs.

An authoritarian right-wing party in the US rose to power two years later in large part by arguing for the need to resist globalist overreach and reassert US sovereignty. “America First” is the naked expression of the US exceptionalism that once masked itself in liberal norms. Ditching the pretense, cruelty and shamelessness stand as reactionary foils for the values of dignity and respect emblematic of the human rights politic that exists in the US but is now in retreat. Withdrawing from multilateral forums like the UN Human Rights Council and defunding foreign aid and development were urgent matters, while travel bans and mass deportation became signature policies. International standards and exposure to scrutiny were replaced by a revanchist ideology of power and self-interest over everything.

A structural, holistic understanding about the role of US power argues that the state needs to be held to account domestically if we hope to mitigate internal injustices and the most harmful expressions of US foreign policy. We cannot hope to advance a better world if we refuse to model this within our own national borders. International human rights can be an effective movement architecture because of the way it links issues, struggles, geographies, and identities; forges institutional connections from the local to the global and back; and brings people together by centering human dignity and equality as the foundational concept. 

Across 30 years and millions invested. the practice of human rights drove campaigns, informed messaging, altered the non-profit and philanthropy sectors, and motivated international engagement. Human rights proved to be a useful container for people-power with the muscle to constrain the arbitrary exercise of state-power and the overindulgences of capitalist markets. In the US, human rights may not be a native species; it does not bloom wildly without proper seeding, intentional nourishment, and consistent care.

Across Democratic and Republican administrations, from the war on terror through Hurricane Katrina, the housing crash, Ferguson, Flint, family separation, the COVID-19 pandemic, Dobbs, mass deportation and the rise of authoritarianism, the human rights framework informed action and shaped calls for accountability. However, a sober assessment of the state of human rights needs only to point to daily headlines to understand that threats to dignity are growing. Executive power is consolidating. Funding streams are drying up. Global machinery is weakening. Outrage is building. In this environment, we have a renewed opportunity to galvanize civil society to use an international framework and build a sustainable human rights culture.