Bangladesh Beyond the Rana Factory Collapse

Generally, Bangladesh does not appear to receive as much attention as its neighboring countries such as India, Nepal, and Burma.  Maybe because it is not as much a travel destination as the other countries or because it is still a relatively new state created in 1971, although the Bengali people date back thousands of years.  Whatever the reasons, it deserves more attention both positive and negative.  Bangladesh is a dynamic place. It is among the top ten most populated states with a population of 170 million people in a country the size of New York State. The capital, Dhaka, is one of the most densely populated cities with hundreds of thousands of bike rickshaws, getting paid about a dime a kilometer, clogging up the streets along with the three wheeled taxis, cars, and seventeen million people.  Although I lived in Hong Kong for many years, it was still a bit of an adjustment getting used to the environment in Dhaka, which included two to three hour commutes to work for a drive that should take twenty minutes. During those long commutes, my foreign colleagues and I would complain about the traffic, a severe source of distress for the locals, and speculate on curious issues such as why people don’t seem to walk in Bangladesh, was it because the rickshaws were so cheap or because there are no sidewalks to walk on or just a cultural thing.

Recently, Bangladesh is probably most well known because of one of the worst industrial disasters in the garment industry - the tragic collapse of Rana Plaza that killed over 1,000 garment workers and injured many more. As I have an interest in business and human rights, it drew me to Bangladesh because it is the second largest exporter of ready made garments at China and has poor working conditions not only exemplified by Rana Plaza but other collapses and fires dating back many years. But it was not only that issue which drew me to Bangladesh, I wanted to discover a country that does not receive as much attention beyond the negative headlines. 

What I found were people working hard to make their country that is one of the poorest outside of sub-Saharan Africa a better place in face of an environment of impunity and struggle. The organization I worked with is one of the leading legal aid organizations in Bangladesh. Headed by a dynamic and eloquent leader and dedicated staff, the organization has many projects and services to help a wide range of people, including females, workers, prisoners, the poor, and minorities.  The organization has also filed many public interest litigation cases to hold the government and other responsible parties accountable for their actions on many different issues.

In the case of Rana Plaza, the organization filed a writ petition before the Supreme Court asking for an investigation and prosecution of those responsible, and helped victims file claims for compensation. I interviewed different stakeholders to understand what justice would entail in response to a disaster like Rana Plaza.  Especially for the workers, it was about dignity, being treated like a human being rather than an expendable commodity.  All too often, especially in a nation with such a big and overcrowded population, the lives of people, usually the poor and marginalized are devalued. The law only requires the payment of a little over USD1,200 to the family of victims of work related deaths. Why should their lives be valued less than others?  Accountability of those responsible was also important to the victims and other stakeholders such as labour lawyers and trade union activists.  But the close ties between the garment industry and government hinders accountability. Also when the government itself has failed to execute its role of regulation and enforcement, accountability is even more illusory. There are improvements, however, as the building owner of Rana Plaza and others have been arrested. But with such worldwide attention, the government probably had little choice. But up to this point no one in the past few decades has been convicted for work related disasters, even though more than five thousand workers have died in the past decade in the garment industry.

Being in Bangladesh, an Islamic country, was also eye opening from a gender perspective.  As my fellow female foreign colleagues would point out they felt at times uncomfortable because of what they had to wear and the stares and attitudes of men.  I often would notice that when meeting men they would only shake my hand and not those of my female colleagues.  Not only did those gender difference manifest socially, personal laws also favor males especially when it comes to marriage and inheritances. 

I very much valued my experience working and living in Bangladesh as it helped me understand and learn a bit more on how to work in an environment that is very different, where the formal legal system often may not work and cultural differences may require navigating a different approach to advocacy and work.  What will always remain with me is the hard work of my local colleagues and their energy and integrity to continue working in such a challenging environment.

Unaccompanied Children, Choice, and Limitations of Legal Relief in the United States Border

The city of New York’s defiantly high Trump Tower in Columbus Circle was the epilogue to my daily underground train ride, to my internship at the Feerick Center for Social Justice, in a car too full of people. Oftentimes, the struggle for train space would flare into a protracted argument spectated by many who are too squished in to be able to do much about it. I walk from the train to the Feerick Center office through a street with a few merchants. That street seemed to find a way to fill itself with people, however. People on the streets optimistically look for a friend to hand them fifty cents to ride the train.

My work with unaccompanied children and the media-proclaimed “surge” took me to San Antonio, Texas. Over there, the streets and the skyline were nearly empty. Most people were privileged to spend some of their fossil fuel reserves on transportation. The people were so friendly that the most oppressive feature about the city was the humid heat. San Antonio is home to The Alamo, a former mission, hospital, and military post that now serves as a reminder of the absurd and horrific outcomes that could come from disputes over land. In the Battle of Alamo, defending Texan settlers suffered a horrific loss in the face of a Mexican government that so brutally asserted its power on lands over which it had claimed prior ownership. Mexico had occupied a large portion of the Western United States for years and Mexico wanted to keep its claim. It is exactly the sentiment of “I was here first and I get to control what happens,” including violent action and depravation, that has later set the stage for children to be confronted with a loss of control over their own choices.

The basic questions of “who owns the country” or “who is a national” is the question that underlies immigration law and policy. Countries answer this question in different ways. In the United States, the question often gets answered by the sentiment of “I was here first.” The notion of being “here first” grants the citizens extensive powers and privileges including the very basic presumption that they have the right to stay. Having the right to stay necessarily extends to having the right to have amenities to be able to live their lives – basically they have the privilege of human rights.

Because the hierarchical racial structure in the United States is so clearly rooted in American culture, it affects the logic and reasoning of state policy, including immigration. The idea that the American national is a descendant of a white, male, landowning ancestor causes a powerful presumption of who was or was not “here first.” Although the sentiment of prior ownership is what is asserted as a justification for citizenship, it is a claim that comes from the presumption that historically only one particular “race of people” was “here first.” Yet, it does not survive scrutiny when history is actually examined. When I walk down the street and meet my fellow Filipinos in New York, it may be with a tacit understanding that most of our families made the migration journey from the Philippines to the United States recently. However, down in Louisiana, a Philippine-descended American may have had Filipino ancestors in that area since before the conception of the United States. Since the galleon trade involved the Philippines and Mexico in 1565, Philippine sailors had frequently jumped ship and stayed in America. The earliest Louisiana settlement of Filipinos is said to have been around since 1763. For some unaccompanied children, their claim to being “here first,” or having an ancestor who had been so may be even stronger.

The justifications that are “acceptable” and the forms of legal relief available are so limited that it can inhibit the freedom to choose and deemphasize the agency of the migrant. In reading their stories, I found that many of the children were brave agents of their own path. They dared to follow a guide or journey on their own in pursuit of a goal and in pursuit of a choice. However, those goals and choices are not the focal point of our immigration law, which concerns itself with the justification or excuse of why someone who is not “here first” should be “allowed” to stay. For example, a person may be “allowed” to stay because they would endanger their life otherwise. Similarly, a child may be “allowed” to stay because he or she would otherwise not have a “proper” home or family. When forms of relief and the child’s choice intertwine, there is no problem. In many other instances, an opportunity for development in the law arises.

I questioned whether to devalue the primacy of the child’s choice due solely to the type of legal relief available to them. For example, I witnessed many cases where the child had a case for a grant of legal relief on the basis of neglect and abandonment or abuse. The way the story goes is that the father abandons or abuses child, often due to alcoholism or death from gang violence, and the mother who does not work may be considered “neglectful” because mother does not work and child is left to earn money for the family by farming at age 12. However, this point of view obscures the role of the child’s choice. Equally often, I witnessed those same cases with the children declaring that they started working because they had a strong desire to support their families – a brave choice that should be respected.

As the person helping to write the case summaries, I felt a palpable tension between doing my best to explain the facts in a way that aligns neatly with the form of relief available and feeling like the factual narrative I was weaving was actively taking away pieces of the child’s life that they themselves had deemed important. Of course, I am not saying that there is necessarily a willful attempt at depressing the choices of the children. In fact, a practitioner with whom I spoke specifically told me about how they made a decision to pursue a strong asylum claim for the child instead of SIJS. The reason for that was the child did not want to rule out his ability to petition for his parents, despite any abuse, neglect, or abandonment they may have inflicted upon him.

Nevertheless, some tension continues to exist because of the framework of the law – focusing less on the choice to migrate and more on what justifiable reason they have for being “allowed” to stay. As the United States struggles to discard its former racial hierarchy, it still needs to find answers to the question of who we are and who we should respect. A good place to start is to respect all humans, who, whether adult or children and from any part of the world, deserve and have inalienable and unassailable rights. All humans have a choice that should be respected. All humans have the right to migrate.

I came out of my experience in San Antonio and New York City with a lot more questions than answers. I return to Fordham with a better sense of the tensions that underlie American culture and society, and a plan to do more about it. Hopefully, the different perspective I bring as a resident Filipino national can help guide their path towards a more racially equal society.

Men As Domestic Violence Victims

The experience I gained this summer working at the Pace Women's Justice Center's Family Court Legal Program is invaluable and extremely rewarding. The Family Court legal program is designed to help victims of domestic violence obtain same day orders of protection through ex parte proceedings. As interns we performed client interviews, drafted family offense, custody and child support petitions and represented clients during the initial proceeding under the supervision of a staff attorney. Through this experience, I learned that a lot of myths about domestic violence are untrue, one of them being that men are not victims.

I will admit, I was suspicious when I talked to my first male client however, as the summer went by and more men came in, I realized that men are as affected by domestic violence as women. One of my male clients was a depressed father of a 3 year old girl who was doing all he could to save his marriage and provide a safe and healthy home for his child. His wife was physically, psychologically and emotionally abusive. He was the most broken and defeated client I had all summer. That day I realized that we did not have a lot of male clients not because they don't exist but because due to societal stigma, male victims do not report abuse from fear that they failed to conform to the social macho stereotype, I also learned that male victims usually lack support from friends and family and most of them deny their victim status.

I shared my sentiments with a few friends and one of them told me "it is never okay for a man to hit a women but it is okay for a woman to hit a man". After noting that  domestic abuse could be psychological, emotional, sexual and financial.  My first question was WHY? Why should we overlook a women hitting a man but persecute a man for hitting a woman? It should never be okay for an individual to hit another. Women hit men in self defense however, there are women out there who get away with physically abusing their male partners on claims of self defense. Men are hardly recognized as victims of domestic violence because they are considered strong but, physical injuries are not the only effects of domestic abuse. They too, feel extremely shamed, frightened, guilty, and experience loss of self worth and confidence. 

The most important thing I've learned from Pace is that, anyone could be a victim of domestic violence. Victims span across every sex, race, social status or sexual orientation. As a society we can do our part by getting rid of our narrow perceptions. It takes a lot of courage and strength for victims to admit that they need help and when that happens we need to help them figure out positive ways to move on with their lives. Men might be most common abusers but we should never downplay the seriousness of the abuse experienced by male victims.  

Fighting Impunity in Nepal

Stella Gilliland

July 25, 2014

Advocacy Forum

Kathmandu, Nepal

          “Namaste.”

             Pooja welcomes me each morning with a quiet greeting, hands pressed in a prayer position. She hands me my morning milk chai. Mornings in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital city, are raucous occasions of barking, construction, and street hawkers advertising their wares.  The mountains ringing the valley are sometimes visible at sunrise, before the haze descends.  Later, just as the afternoon heat is becoming unbearable, the monsoon rains come.

            Pooja is Advocacy Forum’s “didi” (literally: sister), or caretaker.  She cooks Nepali staples for lunch, dhal bhat or maybe mo: mos, the office staff crowded around the plastic table in her small kitchen.  The still afternoons, punctuated with cups of sweet black tea, seem worlds away from the violent conflict that marred the country less than a decade ago and continues to define the Nepali justice system.           

            The decade-long conflict between Maoist insurgents and the Nepali government ended with a ceasefire agreement in 2006.  An estimated 13,000 Nepalis were killed, many of them civilians, women, and children.  The country has struggled to heal and rebuild, hindered by corruption, a bickering and fractious civil society, and entrenched impunity for even the grossest human rights violators.   Despite recent strides in infrastructure and education, Nepal remains one of the poorest, most corrupt, and least developed nations in the world.

            The legal system, especially, continues to feel the growing pains inherent in a post-conflict democracy.  Various committees struggle to replace the 2007 interim Constitution.  The much-anticipated Truth and Reconciliation Commission was finally passed in April, only to be met with domestic criticism and much pooh-poohing by the international community. Cases languish in dilapidated court halls, often postponed dozens of times, over multiple years, or else are dropped after petitioners succumb to bribery and threats.  Judges, in their distinct black caps, write their opinions by hand and verdicts are delivered on traditional Nepali parchment. 

            My work here with Advocacy Forum has centered around litigation for victims of extrajudicial killings and torture.  Advocacy Forum is a national NGO that advocated strongly for victims and their families during and after the conflict.  However, many extrajudicial killing cases stalled after local authorities refused or simply ignored court orders to begin investigations.  Despite continuous pressure from the government and military (frequent threats, onerous compliance laws), Advocacy Forum continues to represent victims and seek new strategies to end impunity for human rights violators and to compensate victims.

            Conducting research in a developing country is an exercise in patience.  Court visits consist of long hours spent waiting, only to hear that the case has been postponed yet again.  Power cuts occur daily, sometimes for up to 14 hours a day.  Generators fall victim to the ubiquitous gas shortages. 

            Despite the frustrations, my experience here has been transformative.  To live in Nepal is to confront daily the scars and challenges of a post-conflict society.  People speak openly of their wartime experiences, of torture and loss but also optimism and national pride.

            I will return to the U.S. with a deeper understanding of how cultural and historic idiosyncrasies can shape a legal system, how international attention can drive domestic litigation, and the importance of a functioning civil society.  When I return to Nepal, as I surely will, I will be excited to see progress towards the pluralist democracy envisioned by the Nepali people.

Russian Courts as Civil Society-Repellent

The Bolotnaya Case, initially against twenty-seven participants in protests on May 6, 2012, the day before the third inauguration of President Vladimir Putin, is the most important legal development in recent Russian history.  Transforming utterly insane allegations against political activists into legal and historical fact, Russian courts are continuing their long-established role as blunt weapons in the Kremlin assault on society. 

The first criminal conviction for participation in the Bolotnaya protests came in November 2012, and the show (pun intended) has been going ever since.  Investigators have openly and repeatedly called the prejudice rich, evidence light case “political” while speaking on the record anonymously to Russian newspapers.

Prosecutors have now successfully made the case that using two prominent leftists as proxies, a Georgian politician dishing out American money was the architect of the May 2012 anti-Putin protests that brought tens of thousands to the streets of Moscow.  The Moscow City Court, in a ridiculous sentencing hearing, all but came out and said that the same is true for the entire White Ribbon protest movement that saw hundreds of thousands demonstrate in Moscow and elsewhere over the course of several months.

   

Before anything else, remember that the 20,000-strong, May 2012 protest in question – officially called the March of Millions – was actually sanctioned by the local government, which is not always true for demonstrations here. It is true that the March – despite being smaller in size relative to other demonstrations around the same time – turned violent.  However, it is generally acknowledged, except by the Russian leadership, that the violence on Bolotnaya was a result of police aggression and provocation. 

Now, the courts are fixating on the March in a bid to rewrite the history of the entire 2011-2012 White Ribbon movement as a series of free-for-all riots orchestrated with foreign funding.  The Bolotnaya revisionism is aided by the Kremlin media apparatus, which for the vast majority of Russians is – not being hyperbolic here – the source of all civil political information.

In February, the Moscow City Court convicted eight Bolotnaya defendants on charges that they participated in riots and used force against “representatives of authority.”  Seven of the defendants were sent to penal colonies, while the sole woman defendant was sentenced to a travel restriction. That ruling in turn sparked protests in central Moscow, where police detained more than 600 people.  And despite subsequent amnesties for some defendants, the European Court of Human Rights is still accepting complaints related to detentions on Bolotnaya-based charges.  

This March, the Moscow City Court committed defendant Mikhail Kosenko, no joke, to compulsory psychiatric treatment in relation to his participation in the March of Millions. Though the court declined a request from Kosenko’s lawyers for an additional psychiatric evaluation, in June it granted him permission to continue his “treatment” at an outpatient clinic.

Most importantly, two opposition leaders were convicted on July 25 on obviously fabricated criminal charges stemming from the March. Lawyer Sergey Udaltsov heads Left Front, which is basically Russia's sole organized non-neo-Nazi political coalition. Left Front member Leonid Razvozzhaev, a union organizer by trade, has also been active as an advisor to opposition MP Ilya Ponomarev – the man with a voting record including, for example, the sole ‘nay’ on the annexation of Crimea.

Udaltsov is known for a rousing public oratory characterized by an ability to lay plain the belligerent cynicism of the Putin government. He is a brave, articulate guy who, therefore, makes the Kremlin deeply uncomfortable.

At a February 2012 demonstration that some estimates put at 120,000 people, Udaltsov, whose great-grandfather was a Bolshevik and actually kind of a big deal in the early Soviet Union, drew cheers from the crowd as he ripped up a portrait of Putin.  At another rally, he got a similar response when he set a portrait of Putin on fire.   

Compare to Aleksey Navalny, the kind of bizarro-world Russian Paul Ryan, who, despite consistent harassment with similarly insane charges, was allowed to participate – and take 27% of the vote – in Moscow’s 2013 mayoral elections.  Navalny, who has spoken at neo-Nazi rallies and leads an anti-corruption project, is bent on making Russia transparent for international capital, posing basically no threat to the ruling class here except in his ability to name and shame people personally.  Udaltsov, not so much – at least as the Kremlin sees it.

In that connection, it’s important to consider Left Front’s constituency.  When I first entered the courtroom for the Udaltsov-Razvozzhaev sentencing hearing, it seemed odd that there were only two or three Left Front members, as far as I could see, in the crowd.  However, I soon realized that I had been blinded by my own self-serving and shallow understanding of Left Front as a group of young, active – let's face it – men.  In reality, there were two dozen elderly women wearing Left Front pins in the crowd, and this demographic actually constitutes a large chunk of the group’s following.  That is one major takeaway from the Kremlin decision to attack Left Front: while the group’s ability to do real, lasting political damage to the machine is probably negligible, the sheer possibility is enough.

Prosecutors and the Moscow City Court held Razvozzhaev and Udaltsov – who Amnesty International considers a prisoner of conscience – personally to account for the caricatured version of Bolotnaya that the rest of Russia already viewed with a heavy helping of skepticism, if not scorn.

Harassed with random and silly administrative and criminal charges since 2010, Udaltsov had been under house arrest since February 2013.  Both men began their latest in a long series of hunger strikes in response to the four-and-a-half-year prison sentences levied against them.  

Charges against the pair were filed following the airing of a heavy-handedly propagandistic “documentary” entitled Anatomy of a Protest 2 on NTV – which is, wait for it, owned by the state energy conglomerate Gazprom. (If you want to split hairs, the Kremlin owns exactly 50% of Gazprom. Those who believe the rest is not owned by Putin allies from Saint Petersburg are deeply confused.) The film alleges that Udaltsov and Razvozzhaev were conspiring to organize a coup using funds from abroad, and purports to show them meeting with the head of Georgia's Parliamentary Defense and Security Committee, Givi Targamadze.  Targamadze is said – to be fair, acknowledged even outside Russia – to have had a hand in the so-called color revolutions in formerly Soviet countries in the aughts.  

Razvozzhaev was kidnapped in Kiev by Russian special forces and brought to Russia to face trial.  He testified that following his abduction, FSB spooks held him at an undisclosed location for two days; denied him food, water, and bathroom access; and tortured him in addition to threatening to kill his children unless he signed a confession. That confession was admitted as evidence, alongside video from Anatomy of a Protest 2. The defense emphasized, to negligible effect, the dubious audio and video quality of the documentary footage and the reports that Razvozzhaev was kidnapped and tortured. 

Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and the European Union have all called on Russia and Ukraine to investigate Razvozzhaev’s abduction, but they shouldn’t hold their breath.  

NTV claims the footage in question was given randomly to one of its employees “on the street by a stranger of Georgian nationality,” so, like, take that however you see fit.  The “documentary” is on YouTube – don’t watch it, it’s really, really, infuriatingly stupid.  It features multiple uses of the same grainy video with different audio dubbing, for example. 

The goal in targeting Udaltsov and Razvozzhaev for prosecution is two-fold: delegitimize the largest, most significant civil movement (to be clear: the White Ribbon movement, not Left Front) in modern Russian history while simultaneously getting rid of an apparently threatening political group.  The delegitimation campaign doesn’t take much explanation: prosecutors and the court fixated on the idea that Udaltsov and Razvozzhaev always received their funding in United States dollars. The dog-whistle intent here is obvious: the anti-Putin protesters of the 2011-2012 movement showed up only because they were paid off by henchmen of the United States government – and therefore are henchmen of the United States government.  Broadcast this version of history ad nauseam on state television, and the rest of Russia – which universally reviles Moscow’s bourgeoisie anyway – begins to see what is really at stake with Bolotnaya.

Prosecutors had sought eight years for both, in addition to a 150,000-ruble fine for Razvozzhaev.

Naively expecting a two-hour sentencing reading, I showed up to the early afternoon proceedings at the Moscow City Court without having eaten breakfast.  Also present in the courtroom: about two dozen officers from five different municipal and federal law enforcement and military agencies, including the Spetsnaz, Russia’s uniformly strikingly handsome special forces.   

Two hours in, the U.S. Embassy’s Political Section staffer in the crowd gets the general idea that the allegations are utterly ludicrous, and calls it a day.  Three hours in, the entire courtroom audience bursts into collective laughter (the first time of several) as the reading of the allegations continues.  Five hours in, one of the judges halts the proceedings so that police can physically remove a sexagenarian woman with a cane who is no longer able to stand; it’s a rule in Russian courts that the entire room must stand as a verdict is read.

After eight hours, I start to hallucinate out of a combination of hunger and impotent rage – I think I hear one of the judges say “Berezovsky,” but how can that even be possible – and decide it’s time to leave.  An hour and a half later, a Left Front contact texts me: “we left, no sign of a decision.”  Later in the night, the Political Section staffer emails me that both defendants got four and a half years.  I order another beer. 

Overall, the judges read blatantly bogus allegations for eleven hours while forcing everyone in the room to stay on their feet.  There’s a lot to unpack here.

The whole process speaks to the Russian leadership’s increasing paranoia and drive to destroy any opposition political group whose message could empower civil society.  As the Kremlin’s crazy narrative snowballs, the political elite here is increasingly finding itself in a place where there is no choice except to overreact to even the sheer possibility of political disruption.   

In this case, the punch line is the sentence.  While the charges were officially the organization of riots across the country, the allegations were actually based on the idea – now legal fact in Russia – that Udaltsov and Razvozzhaev sought and obtained substantial funding from the representative of a foreign state as part of a years-long conspiracy to overthrow the federal government. 

Let that sink in for a minute: two self-evidently dangerous men with powerful international connections, seemingly well on their way to revolution – sentenced to … four and a half years, minus time served?  Belligerent cynicism indeed.

The court stated that the punishment fit the crime, with no further explanation; who knows if there was even anyone left in the courtroom at that point.  That actually leads to another central objective of the Kremlin’s overkill campaign: the demoralization of everyone and anyone who appears even remotely prepared to put up a real fight.   

On a macro level, the goals are clear enough.  First, the transparently political prosecution of a charismatic leftist leader puts other potential opposition activists on notice.  Second, the court sends the message, in this case via pretend transcripts of text message and Skype conversations, that the Kremlin Thug Patrol has ears and eyes everywhere.  Judges described in great detail the cars Udaltsov drove around in with foreign political elites (generally, a black Audi A6), his meetings with “nationalists and anarchists,” and the dollar sums he received – always in United States dollars – from this Georgian politician (ranging from $42 to $90,000).  Overkill is actually the only appropriate word in the entire English language for the allegations’ level of detail.

On a micro level, reading clearly fabricated allegations for eleven hours, while making the whole room stand for the duration, hits in two places.  Subjecting Udaltsov and Razvozzhaev’s supporters to mind-numbing boredom and physical discomfort for an entire day, simply so that they can hear what they knew was coming anyway, is a great way to beat them down.  Meanwhile, the fact that only the most zealous supporters remained in the court as the crucial moment drew near must have taken its emotional toll on Udaltsov and Razvozzhaev, no matter how strong they appeared in court.  And, last but not least, let’s not forget that these two actually have to spend a couple years sitting in prison.

After a long day in court, Left Front activist Ilya Budraitskis put it best in a post on Facebook: the crazier and crazier targeted use of the legal system here is presented as a “price of everlasting Russian stability.”  But with the Kremlin returning its gaze inward, the stability Russians came to enjoy under early Putinism is being replaced by a tenuous stability for the man and his circle, with society’s return on investment going down faster and faster with every activist silenced.

The Importance of Avoiding Stigmatizing Language

When I began my work with the Feerick Center for Social Justice, for the Unaccompanied Immigrant Children Project, the phenomenon of children arriving into the United States to reunite with their families was simply an increasing trend that evaded direct media attention. However, two weeks into my internship, a wave of news relating to the Unaccompanied Immigrant Children project started to come in as a rising amount of children coming to the United States unaccompanied increased significantly. Over time, the most recent unaccompanied immigrant children migration began to take on a name in the media – it was being called “the surge” and there was a news article, op-ed piece, and short interview about it from media outlets daily. With that began a battle to represent reality, with the truth somewhat hidden within a sea of water puns in which I find myself participating. Characterization in some way creates the character itself, somewhat similar but significantly different from the real thing. Words formed the core of the reality that was being portrayed. As an advocate and student, I feel compelled to caution readers and remind myself about the power of words.

Any keen observer could probably tell you that humans have limitations. We cannot be everywhere at once and cannot see everything at once. We have multiple senses but we tend to neglect them save for the one or two that our brains favor. In light of these physical limitations, we have built artificial tools to try and extend our grasp over reality. Words are probably one of the oldest of the artificial tools that continues to be so prominent. Their functionality comes from an assumed but unfounded understanding between people that when a word or utterance is used to convey an idea, then the use of the same word or utterance should convey the same or similar idea when used at some other time. Of course, it should not take anyone a semester’s worth of Contract Law to realize that the assumed understanding of which I speak is far from the reality (but maybe it does! And it took decades for contract law and formalists to even slightly admit that such bright-line rules as the “four corners” rule may be somewhat unhelpful). Words are not necessarily just benign mediums for communication and the conveyance of ideas. They can be more like cannonballs fired from one populace to another in an effort to beat down a certain type of reality into a targeted populace and wipe out other points of view in the process.

Furthermore, any student of social science could probably tell you that the most frequent losers of any cultural shift and war on words are the weakest groups. In a battle where Republicans and Democrats, Conservatives and Liberals, or Pro- and Anti- Interests Groups are drawing lines, it is quite likely that the group who has to suffer through the imposition of such pseudo-realities and descriptions is the migrants themselves. Their stories are filtered through interviews, their lives documented and narrated through snippets and the lenses of other people, their motivations are described by people who have more control over the expression of their own motivations. Yet again, I am reminded of the centrality of participation in a framework that respects humans as having universal, unassailable, and inalienable rights owed to them regardless of their age, nationality, or migration status.

Yet, as dangerous as the use of words have the potential to be, their functionality endures because we have not yet found an equally creative solution to the problem of communication. Without words and language, and some form of standardization of them, then this blog post would make even less sense to you and to me. I wuold be iroinaclly craeting pcitogarphs deiovd of maineng foryuor veiiwng dsiplaeusre.

Language and words are so central to the work that the Feerick Center does. My current assignment is to write a legal framework memo. As I plowed through dozens of cases in New York regarding Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, I became “familiar” with the stories of several children from China, India, Honduras, Ecuador, and Guatemala, simply because I could imagine that a set of images on my screen could represent certain ideas weaved into a story about someone else’s life. The dissemination of stories through written media is also important in human rights advocacy. In the Bringing Human Rights Home Network conference, the group discussed submitting shadow reports to the United Nations. Shadow reports are reports submitted by civil society instead of government on behalf of the country. They are often submitted in the context of reviews for human rights treaties to which a particular country is a signatory – the United States is party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, and the Convention against Torture. Because the reviewers do not get to experience firsthand the experiences of people from a particular country, the data in the shadow reports and the testimony of affected people themselves becomes the basis from which they understand that part of the world. Additionally, advocates in the United States use these same reports and the review process to be able to affect better human rights policy in the context of the review. In the practice of advocacy, the written word often becomes the world view by which decisions are made, because it is otherwise impossible to experience firsthand.

In the context of human rights advocacy, labels could serve to dehumanize a particular group, and make it less sensible that they should have universal and inalienable rights. The terms “illegal” or “illegal alien” are dehumanizing. Generally, talk of aliens is about imaginary beings from the sky, yet we preserve such terminology for humans like us simply because of their birth or origin outside of our arbitrarily defined borders. The word “illegal” attempts to connote the same notion of inhumanity. A human being cannot be illegal. We can commit acts outside the provision of the law, which may be illegal. Even if we did, we are guaranteed rights to protect us from abusive process. The term illegal seems superfluous upon inspection, and unhelpful as a description of reality. Thus, advocates often use the words “undocumented” or “irregular” immigrants to be more accurate.

The term “undocumented” is not just a replacement for the word “illegal” but it is an attempt to increase accuracy. The use of the term “undocumented” or “irregular” immigrant is only accurate in a way that highlights the responsibility of our governments to uphold the rights of all people. An irregular migrant could be a person who found farm work in the United States, yet that person could end up completely undefended by the laws as soon as a farm owner decides to fire them. In this example, the person did nothing “alien” or “illegal” at all, yet such labels might allow us to presume without further inquiry. The point is also not to replace one label with another but to make the story as accurate as possible. The terms “undocumented” and “irregular” are equally criticized. The word “undocumented” presumes that only some forms of documentation are valid. Most migrants carry passports and other documents from their country of origin, and may even have driver’s licenses and other equally valid documents in the country of residence, but the veracity of such a situation may be invalidated by the use of a single word. Similarly, though irregularities in residence occur because of uneven migration policies from state sovereigns, this does not make the migrant “irregular.”

Stories of undocumented immigrants assume often that they are a surge of people coming in to take a slice out of the “American pie.” What tends to be obfuscated is that the family unit is central to the life of a person, and that the American system does not have a proper way to reunify families. We accept the support of our immigrants and yet we are currently refusing to recognize their contributions by restricting their status, and consequently their ability to achieve more for themselves. Furthermore, we have restricted their ability to see their children. Our government can justify placing restrictions on access by the happenstance of how a person comes to be part of the United States because the modern nation-state system presumes a model of a person that is somehow more deserving of rights than others – the citizens.

Yet, regardless of our national origin or migration status, we are still humans and children that possess inalienable and universal rights.