I am a woman with a job that pays a reasonable salary, provides health insurance, gives paid leave, and contributes to a growing nest egg. It just doesn’t leave me with time to clean my house. Thankfully, there are people—most often women—who can be hired to help with that. However, for these individuals, housecleaning (or any other form of domestic work including raising children) routinely means low pay, long hours, and denial of health care. And in the worst cases, it can result in severe physical abuse. As one domestic worker described, “Amid the global recession . . . we perform the necessary labor to make other work possible for American businesses and professionals. We do the very basic and vital work for any economy — taking care of the next generation, the elderly, the homes, cooking food and doing the laundry. But even in New York, our labor remains unrecognized, unprotected, and devalued.” On August 31, New York signed the US’s first law protecting domestic workers’ rights. The bill guarantees overtime pay, a minimum of one day off every seven days, three days of paid leave per year, and protections against sexual harassment and racial discrimination for the estimated 200,000 domestic workers in NY (93 percent of whom are women, 95 percent are people of color, and 99 percent are immigrants). These are more rights than domestic workers anywhere in the US, or in most of the world, have. Let’s make sure other states and countries follow in New York’s footsteps.

On August 23, 2010, the United States State Department submitted its first domestic human rights report to the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC). In 2006, the HRC established the Universal Periodic Review process to assess each U.N. member nation’s adherence to their human rights obligations under international law every four years.

However, in addition to the federally submitted report, a comprehensive shadow report was also published by the U.S. Human Rights Network, a non-governmental human rights organization. The report represents a compilation of 26 independent civil society submissions covering a vast range of human rights issues, and has been endorsed by more than 200 human rights organizations and advocacy groups in the United States. In a statement released by the U.S. Human Rights Network, University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Sarah Paoletti, Senior Coordinator for the Network’s UPR Project, testifies: “Comparing the State Department report with the Network’s, it is clear that gaps remain in our respective understanding of the issues and the solutions needed to resolve them. We look forward to working with the Administration to narrow that gap in future months.”

The United States’ human rights record is scheduled for review in a series of hearings by the U.N. Human Rights Council on November 5th in Geneva, Switzerland.

August 19^th is World Humanitarian Day—a day to honor the work of the hundreds of thousands of women and men around the world determined to eradicate disease, poverty, and violence. Humanitarian aid workers strive to ensure that those in need of life-saving assistance receive it, regardless of their religion, nationality, race, or politics. The right to this assistance is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is guided by humanitarian principles that include neutrality, impartiality, and operational independence. However, in many parts of the world, there is growing skepticism about the integrity of humanitarian aid. In its worst manifestation, this skepticism has resulted in an increasing number of targeted attacks on humanitarian personnel. (Including the 2003 bomb attack in Baghdad that killed 22 UN employees and the UN Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello. World Humanitarian Day was originally initiated in recognition of this tragic event.) A healthier form of criticism is represented in films like Good Fortune—“a provocative exploration of how massive international efforts to alleviate poverty in Africa may be undermining the very communities they aim to benefit.” The film shows a Kenyan man’s farm being flooded by an American investor who hopes to alleviate poverty by creating a multimillion-dollar rice farm and a woman’s business being demolished as part of a U.N. slum-upgrading project in Africa’s largest shantytown. Humanitarian assistance is both a right and a responsibility. However, it is clear that we—as a world community—still have far to go in figuring out how to do it both right and responsibly.

Despite recent years of tremendous economic growth, India is facing incredible challenges of how to address the desperate needs of its hungry and poor, as more than 421 million people live in poverty and nearly half of all children under five are underweight. Recent New York Times articles provide excellent coverage on this issue and a closer look at the life and challenges of India’s poor. While elected officials and experts agree on the need to reevaluate India’s failing social safety nets, they disagree on the roles of government and the market in hunger relief programs. The President of the ruling Indian National Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, is advocating for the creation of a constitutional right to food. But with widespread corruption in the existing food delivery systems, critics are skeptical that a constitutional right and expansion of the current system would solve the practical problems of distribution. Of course, Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights clearly addresses the issue of hunger, stating “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food.” It will be fascinating to see how the world’s largest democracy will address perhaps the most complex issue facing our world today- the implementation of human rights ideals in a global reality of mass economic inequality.

Credit: Lynsey Addario for the NYTimes

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which was signed into law on July 26, 1990. The ADA prohibits discrimination based on disability, which is defined as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity. In the United States alone, one out of every five people are affected by a disability, which is roughly 54 million Americans. However, since the ADA was enacted into law, significant changes in technology have created new challenges and forms of discrimination for people living with disabilities. For instance, people with disabilities are twice as likely to not have access to the internet or are severely limited to certain online activities. Those who are blind, for example, are often unable to enter passwords and use certain authentication software, barriers that could be overcome with the development and availability of voice recognition technologies.

As we look back at the last twenty years of progress in increasing access and eliminating forms of discrimination based on disability, we must keep the voices and experiences of people with disabilities at the forefront of policy debates to ensure that our laws keep up with changes in technology and that they continue to protect against new forms of discrimination which impede upon peoples’ capacity to engage with their communities and fulfill their chosen life courses.

After a 16-hour debate, and a vote that ended in the wee hours of the morning, Argentina’s Senate passed a bill recognizing same-sex marriages, thus becoming Latin America’s first nation to grant homosexual couples the same rights, protections, and privileges of marriage as heterosexual couples. Less comprehensive measures towards marriage equality have been instituted in other regions of Latin America, such as the legalization of same-sex civil unions in Uruguay and in a small number of states in Brazil and Mexico. And recently last year, Colombia’s Constitutional Court granted equal civil, political, social and economic rights to gay couples, including such protections as inheritance rights and the inclusion of partners in health insurance plans. In Buenos Aires, proponents of the same-sex marriage bill framed the issue in terms of fulfilling the constitutional mandate of equality before the law and ending discrimination towards individuals based solely on their sexual orientation. Opponents, on the other hand, argued that the passage of such a bill would signify a threat to the “existence of the human species.”

Despite the existence of  reasonable objections to gay marriage based on religious belief, I find the argument that a bill granting same-sex couples the right to marry if they so choose will endanger the survival of humanity a bit absurd, if not dangerous in its fear-mongering. Passing legislation that grants homosexual couples equal rights will not magically change the sexual orientation of heterosexuals. The earth is currently the home of 6,830,000,000 human inhabitants; and according to a 2004 UNICEF report, more than 16,000,000 children are without parents, a number which is only increasing with the spread of HIV/AIDS. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that procreation is not an issue for the human race. It seems to me that the larger, more pressing issue for humanity is caring for humanity, and creating a world where all 7 billion of us have an equal chance at healthy, self-determined lives, free of discrimination in all of its forms.

Gay Pride Activists in Buenos Aires (AP Photo)

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The average American is a slave to technology. Although no one really knows the physical and psychological impact of this, there is a lot of discussion recently about the danger of computers and cellphones. According to several articles and books, these “gadgets” have resulted in shallower thinking, weakened concentration, reduced creativity, heightened stress, and interrupted work and family life. There are also concerns about the physical impact. One Swedish study that followed young people, who began using cellphones as teenagers, for 10 years calculated a 400 percent increase in brain tumors. Another study revealed a potential link between cellphone radiation and loss in bees’ honey production—given that bees pollinate 90% of commercial crops in the USA the side effects of this could eventually be dire. However as Maureen Dowd wrote, “even if scientists told us our computers would make our arms fall off, we’d probably keep typing.” All this recent attention to the physical and psychological impacts notwithstanding, it is people who don’t even use these “gadgets” that are at the greatest, yet far less talked about, risk. Smartphones and laptops are built from minerals—tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold—that warlords trade and use to fund mass slaughter and rape in eastern Congo. This straightforward video by the Enough Project describes how these minerals leave a trail of destruction from the mines in Congo to the cellphone in your pocket, and what consumers can do to help end the violence.

On this day in 1852, the day following the spectacular celebrations of July 4th, the great abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass delivered one of the hallmark speeches of the anti-slavery movement, the Fifth of July speech. The speech is a profound work that weaves together both irony and powerful demands for human liberty. It is often overlooked, however, that Douglass was invited to deliver this address by the Ladies of the Rochester Anti-Slavery Society. In understanding the significance of this speech, it is thus crucial to recognize the interconnectedness among social justice movements and how the long-fought struggles for racial equality and women’s rights were able to transform popular consciousness by drawing upon principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence- namely the existence of inalienable rights and the Right of the People to alter or abolish government if it becomes destructive of securing the rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. While the speech is a most pressing condemnation of the hypocrisy of the United States- in proclaiming freedom and liberty while profiting from the cruel and exploitative practice of slavery- the echo at the conclusion of the speech inspires critical reflection of the Declaration and resounds a call to action to uphold the nation’s most fundamental principles.

“Fellow citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them… To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American Slavery…

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which lie is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”

Today, June 22nd, marks the Global Day of Solidarity for death row prisoner, Troy Davis. Davis is accused of fatally shooting Mark MacPhail in 1989. However, after serving more than 18 years on death row, Davis continues to assert his innocence, and serious questions concerning the fairness of his trial have sparked international concern in the human rights community: there was no physical evidence presented in Troy Davis’ trial, the weapon used in the crime was never found, and the case against him rests entirely on witness testimony, even though seven of the nine witnesses have recanted or contradicted their testimony and have admitted they were coerced by police.

As part of its Freedom School in Savannah, Georgia held this past week, representatives from Amnesty International USA and Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty have held educational programs around universal human rights and the death penalty, and the application of capital punishment here in the United States. The Global Day of Solidarity, which will include vigils around the world, is being organized to raise consciousness surrounding Troy Davis’ case as the Georgia Federal District Court begins reviewing new evidence, as ruled last August by the U.S. Supreme Court. Human rights groups will be holding a candlelight vigil in Savannah and at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta, and along with the NAACP, will be holding hours of prayer for both Troy Davis and the family of Mark MacPhail.

Vigil Participants Hold Photos of Troy Davis

There are many choices that, in a democratic country, should be a woman’s right to make—including the choice of what to wear and where to pray. For Muslim citizens of Western countries, however, the right to make these choices is in question. In May, the French government approved a measure to ban full-body veils (burqas, niqabs) in public. According to the leader of the French National Assembly, the ban is both necessary for public safety and a good thing for France and democracy. In response, many women’s rights activists assert that the ban is patronizing and dehumanizing for French Muslim citizens. In the US, the debate is about where Muslim women can pray. A group of Muslim women have begun organizing mosque pray-ins in an attempt to end the gender segregation that occurs in nearly two-thirds of American mosques. (Segregation in mosques is not practiced traditionally and historically in Islam. In the Grand Mosque of Mecca, Islam’s holiest shrine, women and men perform all the hajj rituals, including praying, without segregation.) In a recent Huffington Post article, Jehan Harney asserts that these activists can gain supporters “not necessarily by demanding mosques change their policies to have men and women pray side-by-side, but rather demanding mosques to give women their right to choose where to pray.”