US Human Rights Network

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications.
Primary sources and sources affiliated with the subject of the article are generally not sufficient for a Wikipedia article. Please include more appropriate citations from reliable sources, or discuss the issue on the talk page.
This article has been tagged since January 2008.

The US Human Rights Network (USHRN) is a national network composed of over 200 grassroots human rights organizations and over 700 individual activists working to strengthen the protection of human rights in the United States. The organization seeks "to challenge the pernicious belief that the United States is inherently superior to other countries of the world, and that neither the US government nor the US rights movements have anything to gain from the domestic application of human rights."[1] Network members include organizers, lawyers, policy groups, educators, researchers, and scholars working on a wide range of domestic human rights issues, some of whom are also individuals directly affected by human rights violations. The US Human Rights Network is currently headquarted in Atlanta, GA.

[edit] History

The US Human Rights Network was founded in 2003 by a collaboration of over 50 organizations and individuals. The Network is an outcome of the US Human Rights Leadership Summit "Ending Exceptionalism: Strengthening Human Rights in the United States," held in July 2002 at Howard University Law School. This summit brought together activists from a variety of different disciplines and issue areas to assess human rights work in the United States and identify ways to strengthen the human rights agenda. Specifically, the summit was an effort to foster dialogue and strategic thinking across issues as well as sectors of work. Summit participants represented six issue areas (Poverty, discrimination, immigration, incarceration, death penalty, and sovereignty), and six sectors of work (education, documentation, organizing, legal, policy, and scholarship). The Leadership Summit was the first time that many of these activists had come together to discuss an emerging US human rights movement. Summit participants decided that a human rights network would be the most useful way to enable a broad array of organizations and individuals to work collaboratively to strengthen human rights work in the United States. [2]

The US Human Rights Network was officially launched on Human Rights Day (December 10th) 2003.