Columbia Law joined forces with the American Civil Liberties Union Thursday night to address how unjust detention laws could be altered in the future.
The ACLU created a Human Rights Program in 2004 with the aim of holding the U.S. government accountable on universal human rights principles, as well as the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. At Thursday’s event, the Human Rights Institute at the Columbia Law School co-sponsored a panel discussion with the ACLU to discuss the importance of protecting these rights in prisons. The event considered detention in four different contexts—prisoners’ rights in the criminal justice system, immigration detention, prisoners in armed conflict (counter-terrorism), and juvenile detention.
The panel kicked off with Sir Nigel Rodley, a professor of law at the University of Essex, who pointed out challenges the nation has faced in redefining the concept of torture, and how this affects the realm of human rights. He noted that immense progress has been made over the past decade as “all that got lost in the past came under challenge.”
The discussion touched upon problems in American prisons such as crowding, mistreatment, and brutality. David Fathi, the director of the U.S. Program at Human Rights Watch, highlighted the fact that America is a global outlier in its strikingly large population of people in prison. According to Fathi, “the eighth amendment, which is the only type of legal protection available for prisoners, had serious limitations. It is clear that the eighth amendment has not protected human dignity.”
Panelists went on to address the juvenile justice system. Mie Lewis, a staff attorney with the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, claimed that kids are treated like adults and that the system’s refusal to acknowledge the special status of children is the root of abuse. “The law actually is not that bad in terms of acknowledging children,” Lewis said, “but there is a big gap between the law and practice.”
Sunita Patel, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, discussed injustices in immigration detention policies. She criticized the U.S. government’s mandatory immigration detention system—which often detains immigrants for prolonged periods—as being in serious violation of basic human rights. “We have the largest migration control system that is based on detention,” Patel said, “and the government fails to provide fair judicial assessment of immigrants.”
Speaking on the detention of prisoners in armed conflict, Scott Horton, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and a New York attorney known for his work in international human rights law, emphasized that there has been a failure to frame responsible debate on long-term detention in a way that would lead to solutions. “This discussion has become a way for one political party to score points against another political party,” Horton said. “This has to move beyond the politics, beyond the partisan political discourse.”
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