Thursday, October 16, 2014
Vanita Gupta and Human Rights
Vanita Gupta, the newly appointed (and soon to be formally nominated) Acting Director of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, will likely have an important role to play in the upcoming Universal Periodic Review of the U.S. conducted under the auspices of the UN Human Rights Council. Past Civil Rights chiefs and staffs have often served as spokespersons before UN bodies monitoring US compliance with human rights norms, and have contributed to civil society dialogues before and after the reviews. Happily, Vanita Gupta is one of a new generation of domestic civil rights lawyers who will bring a deep understanding of human rights to the position.
Gupta has worked on human rights internationally, consulting with the Open Society Institute, for example. But she has also framed domestic advocacy in human rights terms. She has served on the U.S. Advisory Board for Human Rights Watch, contributing to that organization’s attention to domestic human rights violations. And earlier in her career, in 2008, she authored an article entitled “Blazing a Path from Civil Rights to Human Rights: The Pioneering Career of Gay McDougall,” published in Bringing Human Rights Home: A History of Human Rights in the United States, which I co-edited with Cynthia Soohoo and Catherine Albisa. In that piece, which reproduced an in-depth interview with Gay McDougall, Gupta noted that McDougall “has fundamentally changed the way U.S. civil rights, activists, and lawyers engage with human rights both domestically and globally,” blazing a path for “countless civil rights lawyers in the United States to expand the struggle both in terms of what rights are as well as where and how rights can be affirmed and promoted.” Gupta’s own record of work on racial justice, immigrant rights, criminal justice reform and other critical U.S. human rights issues exemplifies such a path-breaking approach.
Vanita Gupta’s appointment and pending nomination have already been praised in many quarters, crossing political divides. U.S. human rights lawyers and activists also have reason to be encouraged by this nomination.
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/human_rights/2014/10/vanita_gupta_human_rights_record.html