Outdated crime laboratories housed inside U.S. law enforcement agencies contribute to wrongful convictions, says Steve Weinberg in the July/August issue of Miller-McCune. He cites a recent study titled, “Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward,” and the results are overwhelmingly clear. He writes:

Law enforcement crime laboratories are underfunded, filled with poorly trained and/or technologically backward staff, beset by quality control problems and, too often, complicit in wrongful convictions because criminalists unintentionally misread evidence or intentionally lie.

Weinberg warns that until crime laboratories are updated with current technology and removed from police headquarters, forensic examiners are more likely to succumb to pressure from prosecutors to provide conviction-worthy evidence. “One incompetent or dishonest criminalist,” he writes, “can infect hundreds of cases in a crime laboratory, with some of those cases mutating into wrongful convictions.”

Source: Miller-McCune

Image by billaday, licensed under Creative Commons.

In a commencement address at Harvard this spring, excerpted in Greater Good, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling spoke about the unique power of human imagination to change the world. Rowling said that when she worked for the human rights organization Amnesty International in her early 20s, she shared office space with former political prisoners and read the testimonies of torture victims. The experience made her realize that imagination is what allows us to empathize with people who have suffered horribly and to act on their behalf. The danger of inaction, Rowlings said, comes from people who “prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all”: 

They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages. They can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally. 

Rowling urged the Harvard graduates to “retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages.” To change the world, she said, all that we need is “the power to imagine better.” 

To read more about the need for imagination, see the creativity package in the July/August issue of Utne Reader.

It isn’t often you hear the United Nations Human Rights Council praised, but that’s the message Peggy Hicks delivered at the recent Human Rights Law and Policy Conference in Minneapolis. Hicks is the global advocacy director at Human Rights Watch and a vocal defender of the two-year-old United Nations Human Rights Council, which replaced the controversy-plagued UN Human Rights Commission. A quick poll of the audience of lawyers, human rights advocates, and laypeople revealed a flurry of affirmation from those who knew of the council, which then dwindled to a few tentative hands for those who had heard anything good about it. 

The council has received frequent criticism for its repeated condemnation of Israel, coupled with a lack of strong action against other states committing serious human rights abuses. Hicks rebutted two common Israel-related criticisms: first, the council has condemned states other than Israel, including Sudan, Burma, North Korea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia; and second, the council may spend a disproportionate amount of time on Israel, but it is far from the majority of its time. In addition to the council’s actions on the above states, it also did significant work on Sri Lanka, Hicks said, and held a special session on Sudan, sending a mission there (though the government blocked its entry). 

Hicks’ defense of the council was modest, but she offered suggestions for improvement, since, she said, we can’t replace it with anything stronger. Getting Southern nongovernmental organizations to the United Nations office in Geneva, where the Human Rights Council meets, would help those groups put pressure on their own governments, Hicks said. State membership on the council also could be improved through continuing to encourage competitive campaigns for seats on the council—competition which wasn’t a feature of the Human Rights Commission. (In the council’s second year, Belarus—which is infamous for cracking down on its media, political dissidents, and human rights groups—lost its bid for membership to Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, a defeat Hicks commended as a sign that the council might eventually build a membership of states with strong human rights records.) Hicks also praised the council’s ability to examine the human rights record of all UN member states through a four-year cycle of Universal Periodic Review begun this April. The United States is up for review at the council’s 10th session in 2010. 

This fall the Olympics will bring us the spectacle “of the human body at the height of health, beauty, discipline, power, and grace,” writes Rebecca Solnit for Orion (article not available online). In her elegant essay, "Looking Away from Beauty," Solnit points to the frail connection those bodies have to the nations they represent—“as though this feat of balance really had something to do with Austria, that burst of power really represented Japan.”

Of utmost importance, Solnit writes, is to consider the way those pristine bodies, those symbols of national pride, exist in conflict with bodies less revered, less public:

It serves the nations of the world to support the exquisitely trained Olympian bodies, and it often serves their more urgent political and economic agendas to subject other bodies to torture, mutilation, and violent death, as well as to look away from quieter deaths from deprivation and pollution. . . . The celebrated athletic bodies exist in some sort of tension with the bodies that are being treated as worthless and disposable. . . . But the associations between the two are crucial to our sense of compassion, and of what it means to be part of a global community.

Catholics are no strangers to schisms, but breaking secular ties is proving tricky, reports the Catholic newsweekly America (subscription required). When Amnesty International announced its policy supporting the worldwide decriminalization of abortion in August 2007, affiliated Catholic chapters had to decide whether the nonprofit’s work against torture and the death penalty outweighed its stance on abortion.

Unsurprisingly,  America found that many Catholic chapters disaffiliated from Amnesty International. “It’s disappointing,” says Monsignor Robert McClory, chancellor of the Archdiocese of Detroit. “On particular cases, we can work together. But the kind of in-depth collaborative work of the past would be stifled by the decision they’ve taken.”

In spite of the controversial policy, some social justice–minded Catholics are finding it difficult to abandon Amnesty International's work completely. Notre Dame’s campus chapter changed its name to “Human Rights Notre Dame” but continues to rely on information from Amnesty’s “Urgent Action” alerts. Across the Atlantic, the predominantly Catholic Amnesty Northern Ireland has struggled with breaking ties, reports Ireland’s public service broadcaster RTÉ, and is considering letting Catholic schools re-join Amnesty International if they can be sure funds raised won’t help support abortion. 

Catholic human rights groups may continue to seek new affiliations. America speculates that some may look to abortion-neutral human rights organizations such as the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

Image by Takoma Bibelot, licensed under Creative Commons.

It’s an unrelentingly grim global forecast for activists and protestors worn down by decades of recurring injustices. But thanks to the human rights website New Tactics, activists needn’t rely on stale techniques to create change. Coordinated by the Minneapolis-based Center for Victims of Torture, New Tactics helps human rights defenders share stories of successful strategies, like text messaging to stop torture, an action by the human rights group Amnesty Netherlands that mobilized thousands of young people to demand the release of an imprisoned journalist in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Activists can also discuss how successful techniques can work in other countries and communities.

Starting June 25, New Tactics members will discuss the use of video in human rights advocacy, which, incidentally, was the subject of a recent Utne Reader story on creating participatory video to combat gender-based violence.

Also check out Utne.com's new special project, "Tracking Torture Coverage," a regularly updated roundup of the best torture coverage from around the globe.

Last century ended with a series of shameful failures by UN peacekeepers to save lives in Somalia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. In the beginning of the 21st century, we face another round of tenuous peacekeeping assignments in Africa: in Sudan’s Darfur, Chad, the Central African Republic, and, again, Somalia. 

For many, the allocation of forces from the African Union, European Union, and United Nations to these volatile spots is cause for relief. François Grignon and Daniela Kroslack, the director and deputy director respectively of the International Crisis Group’s Africa program, however, see reason for concern. 

Writing in Current History’s April issue on Africa (subscription only), the two warn that the world has come to regard peacekeeping missions as Band-Aids—forces that emptily assuage human rights concerns with a show of military muscle that is in fact impotent in the face of danger. Unlike many others, Grignon and Kroslack aren’t taking aim at peacekeeping regulations that limit engagement. Rather, the teeth they say are missing from peacekeeping missions are diplomatic, not fire-power, related. 

“The military component of a peacekeeping mission is only as effective as the mission’s political masters make it,” they write. Without “viable peace agreements to implement,” peacekeepers are simply biding their time amidst social collapse. 

Intensive political negotiations, diplomatic pressure, and commitments to address the root causes of conflicts are what’s most needed and—not surprisingly—what’s most difficult. 

Despite peacekeeping missions’ shortcomings, though, Grignon and Kroslack do point to some unexpected successes: 

Recent peacekeeping operations have indeed achieved notable successes in Africa. Yet, paradoxically, their success has not been in the area of civilian protection. The UN Mission in Congo (Monuc) efficiently supported the peace process in the DRC [the Democratic Republic of Congo] and deserves considerable credit for the successful organization of Congo’s 2005 constitutional referendum and 2006 general elections. 

It seems that the bureaucrats and soldiers might be more effective if they switched places. It’s time to marshal our diplomatic forces for the fight and train armed peacekeepers in the tedious work of democracy building.

Image of African Union peacekeepers in Darfur by Patrick-André Perron, licensed under Creative Commons.

Indian women are donning pink saris, grabbing sticks, and cracking heads for human rights. A group known as the Gulabi Gang (gulabi means pink in Hindi) has decided to fight for human rights, literally. The all-female, pink-clad vigilante force is exposing corruption in Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s poorest regions. They target men who beat or blackmail their wives by attacking the men with sticks. Soutik Biswas of the BBC News spoke with Sampat Pal Devi, the leader of the gang. "Mind you," she says, "we are not a gang in the usual sense of the term. We are a gang for justice."

—Brendan Mackie