INTERVIEW:CLOSE GUANTÁNAMO, stop torture, end rendition - these are the three proposals the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has for the first day of the Obama presidency, writes Carol Coulter.
Steve Shapiro is the legal director of the 88-year-old organisation that came into being in the aftermath of the first World War, when thousands of Americans were imprisoned for opposing US involvement in the war. He is in Dublin this week to address the annual Dave Ellis memorial lecture for the legal rights campaigning organisation Flac. Since its foundation in 1920, the ACLU has played a major role in the development of constitutional law in the US, taking more Supreme Court cases every year than any other private organisation.
However, he acknowledges that public interest litigation alone has its limitations. "Public interest litigation cannot be divorced from its larger political context," he said. "With rare exceptions, courts do not like to get too far ahead of public sentiment and, when they do, their decisions often produce a political backlash that imperils progress. "I hope we will have a new administration that is more sympathetic to human rights than in the past, and it will be less necessary to fight these issues in court," he said. "I hope it will be possible to sit down and talk to the new administration in a way we could not before. Barack Obama took political positions during the long presidential campaign. We will be seeking to ensure those promises are kept."
Although cautiously optimistic about the new administration, Shapiro said the ACLU is non-partisan and must remain vigilant in pursuit of its policies. He acknowledged it will be a challenge to ensure that human rights remain on the agenda in the face of the economic crisis in the US.
There is much to be done. "National security issues go beyond Guantánamo, torture and rendition. There is the vast expansion of surveillance, the suppression of dissent, people are denied visas for entry to the US because of their views."
He hopes to see a much greater engagement by the new administration with international human rights bodies and the United Nations, and a different attitude to international treaties.
Recalling earlier campaigns of the ACLU, he said that the prohibitions on "communists" were gradually removed, but these had been replaced by prohibitions on alleged "terrorists".
"I don't think all this has made the country more secure. It has created a sense of resentment against the US internationally. I always rejected the argument that there is a trade-off between human rights and security. What has happened over the past eight years is that we have lost both."
He pointed out that change will come in many ways, not just in legislative change and international relations. "One of the things that the Obama administration will do is alter the nature of the federal judiciary, which will make a huge difference to the human rights landscape," he said.
This change will not come in the Supreme Court, which is balanced between four conservatives and four liberals (whom he prefers to describe as moderates), with a swing voter, as its conservative judges are the younger members, and judges on this court are appointed for life. Its oldest member, and most liberal, is 88. So those likely to be replaced by the Obama administration in the coming years are most likely to be the moderate members.
However, he expects that the next new member of the Supreme Court may come from the political rather than the legal world, pointing out that its most progressive chief justice, Earl Warren, had been governor of California.
The ACLU is now an organisation with more than half a million members and an office in every state. While having a focus on the courts at both state and federal level, he warned of the need to back this up with grassroots organisation and coalition-building. "It is hard to sustain change without popular support," he said.