By Ann W. Parks

Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright speaks at the third annual Samuel Dash conference on April 8

Former president Jimmy Carter once remarked that “America did not invent human rights … human rights invented America.” Yet today, some say, the same America that was instrumental in bringing about the defeat of Hitler and the fall of the Berlin Wall is symbolized, not by Lady Liberty, but by the image of an Iraqi soldier forced to stand on a box at Abu Ghraib prison. Still, human rights can reinvent America once again — and participants at the third annual Samuel Dash Conference on Human Rights at Georgetown Law April 8 had plenty of ideas as to how the next American president should accomplish this task.

Keynote speaker Madeleine Albright, the former U.S. Secretary of State and Mortata Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, said that the winner of the November elections must rectify the mistakes of America’s past, eliminate torture as a tool in the fight against terrorism, close the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay and throw away the key. The United States, she said, must reoccupy the high ground in the human rights battle.

“It will happen if we employ our nation’s ingenuity and wealth to defeat the axis of evil: poverty, ignorance and disease,” she said. “It will happen if we show that America is exceptional because of our powerful commitment to justice, not by using our power to carve out exceptions for ourselves.”

The foundation for any human rights policy, Albright said, should be the promotion of democracy. “I understand well that democracy is only a form of government, not a pathway to paradise,” she commented. “Democracy doesn’t guarantee anything, but it does provide the best chance that leaders will be held accountable, minority rights respected and abuses protected over time.”

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, discussed the activities of that court since its establishment in 2002. Created to address the most serious and large-scale human rights violations, the ICC will see its first trial in June, involving the use of child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is also investigating human rights violations in the Central African Republic and has issued arrest warrants for individuals charged with crimes in Uganda and Darfur, Sudan.

“Darfur is a test for the international community, how we will manage violence,” he said.

Champions

Panels addressed the inclusion of social and economic rights — such as education, healthy working conditions and health care — into U.S. human rights policy; and the challenges of dealing with U.S. allies and partners with problematic human rights records. The day was also a tribute to Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Cal., a human rights champion who died in February.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., noted at the conference that Lantos was the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress and lost his family in the Nazi death camps, a horror that would shape his later role as a human rights leader.

“Tom observed and he endured human nature at its most depraved,” Ros-Lehtinen said. “The horrors of fascism … were a crucible that forged and refined his unshakable commitment to the protection of human rights.”

The Samuel Dash Conference on Human Rights was sponsored by the Law Center’s Human Rights Institute and the Center for American Progress. It was established by Dash’s family and friends, Georgetown Law alumni and the law firm of Cozen O’Connor to honor Dash, who spent nearly 40 years as a professor at Georgetown Law before his death in 2004. Among other things, Dash led a human rights mission to Northern Ireland to investigate the 1972 “Bloody Sunday” incident and became involved in mediation efforts that led to the release of anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990. His wife Sara and two daughters attended this year’s conference.