The President and Congress are not above the Constitution

The Supreme Court gave a stinging, if narrow, rebuke yesterday to President Bush and congress regarding detainees at Guantanamo. By declaring that detainees have the right to seek their release in our standard court system, the Supreme Court should have finally put an end to Bush's flaunting of the constitution in the name of the "war on terror." Amnesty hails the decision but calls it "a limited victory for human rights." Scotusblog looks at some of the scenarios that may play out in the White House, the Pentagon and the court system. There is, of course, a multitude of other coverage.

It seems to me, though, that the real tragedy of this is how long it has taken. Bush has essentially shown that the courts move so slowly on issues like this that a president can get away with more than 6 years of human rights and constitutional abuses. Worst of all, there are no repercussions for these actions. The President and the Congress are not above the Constitution, but for long periods of time, they can act as if they are.

Psych Hospital held man in solitary confinement for 20 years

I posted the following story over on Digg. Here is my brief description:

Unbelievable, a Hispanic man in his 50's has spent 20 years in solitary confinement without access to other patients. He speaks no English and yet almost all of his medical and psychiatric care was provided by people who didn't speak Spanish. "We think it is an egregious violation of human rights," said Alex R. Gulotta. You got that right!

Mental health is another area in which human rights abuses are common and unreported. Kudos to the committee for discovering and reporting this crime. We need more transparency and oversight in this arena as in so many others.

read more | digg story

2 Amnesty Campaigns

I've added 2 campaigns from Amnesty International to my links. The first one, which you will find on the left, is called Unsubscribe Me. It is a campaign to enlist people to show their displeasure about human rights abuses perpetrated in the name of the "war on terror." If you are appalled by things like water-boarding, Abu Ghraib, unlawful detentions in Guantanamo or any other abuses, please sign up.

The second campaign is called irrepressible, and you'll find it along the bottom of my blog. It exists because countries around the world are censoring and blocking internet access to sites that are critical of them or their leaders. To make matters worst, many companies are helping them in their censorship (including the company hosting this blog). Irrepressible dynamically publishes censored content to a site every time the page is loaded. This helps subvert the companies' and governments' attempts at censoring public web content. Take a read and consider adding irrepressible to your own site.

Water and Human Rights

I got the latest magazine from Heifer International, and they had a story about the U.N.'s Water for Life program. The magazine story and the U.N.'s online resources have reminded me how absolutely central access to clean water is to human rights.

Water, of course, is central to everything we do. We can live only days without it, but it isn't just ingesting that makes water important. Its use in agriculture, livestock rearing, hygiene and even transportation are vital parts of a person's life. The U.N. estimates that over 2 million people die each year from diseases that are due to unclean or contaminated water sources. Most of these deaths are of children who are least able to fight off these diseases.

As more people live in water-scarce areas, other human rights problems arise. People sometimes have to travel great distances to obtain clean water, and this puts them at risk of becoming the prey of bandits, warlords or other criminals in the area. Such dangers are shouldered disproportionately by women, who are often the ones who are charged with fetching water and doling it out for all of a family's needs.

Access to clean water is an imperative and is as much a human rights issue as an ecological or environmental issue. People in developed countries can think of ways to improve the problem, whether by donating to build wells (or traveling somewhere to help dig one!) or just by wasting a little bit less of the water that most of us take for granted.