Human rights are universal principles that transcend politics and offer a roadmap to a better future, and elections in the United States have long held not only domestic but also global significance for human rights. All U.S. government officials and candidates for office should do their part to ensure that the U.S. government meets its human rights obligations, uses its influence to advance human rights globally, and engages other governments to do the same.
The world is watching to see who the U.S. elects this November: leaders who will actively protect human rights here and worldwide – or leaders who will deny them.
We, human rights voters and supporters, ask candidates and elected officials to advance a better future for all by embracing a Human Rights Platform that includes the following:
Protecting human rights means ensuring that all people have equal enjoyment of their rights, regardless of their race. But in the United States today, Black, brown, and Indigenous Americans are subject to profiling, unlawful arrests, mass incarceration, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment – as well as disproportionate police violence that can result in death. Structural racism also creates barriers that can impede communities’ and individuals’ access to education, quality healthcare, and other human rights.
Candidates should commit to a comprehensive plan to advance racial justice in line with human rights. Such plans should include, but not be limited to addressing the debt for chattel slavery, colonialism, and their ongoing harmful legacies both in domestic and foreign policy, including through the establishment of a federal reparations commission, concrete action to end police abuses, and economic policies that reduce racial wealth inequalities and disparities in health, education, and other rights.Â
Protecting our human rights means keeping communities safe from gun violence. Each day in the United States, more than 100 people die from gun violence. There are clear policy solutions to this crisis that have been shown to work and could be implemented at the local, state, and federal levels, but politicians continue to prioritize gun money over human lives. And globally, the unregulated proliferation of small arms and light weapons contribute to numerous forms of violence – from armed conflict to domestic abuse.
Candidates should support legislation and efforts that will uphold the U.S.’s human rights obligation to protect all people in the U.S. from gun violence; this includes but is not limited to banning assault weapons, ensuring universal background checks, funding gun violence prevention and intervention programs, and banning guns at polling places. Candidates should commit to condemning and countering armed white nationalist groups, including in the run up to the election. Candidates should also commit to take action to prioritize human rights and civilian protection and reaffirm U.S. government signature of the Arms Trade Treaty, an international treaty that prohibits transfers of weapons, munitions, and related items when they would be used to commit or facilitate genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and serious human rights violations, and that bars weapons shipments to countries under UN arms embargoes.
The only person who should decide whether or not to keep a pregnancy is the pregnant person, not the government. But politicians across the country are increasingly restricting and even criminalizing the right to abortion. Abortion is now totally or near-totally banned in at least 26 states. And in addition to restricting access to abortion at home, organizations receiving U.S. assistance have been prohibited from providing safe abortion, threatening millions of lives around the globe. Abortion is a human right, and criminalizing abortion violates the rights of women, girls, and people who can become pregnant.
Candidates should commit to supporting laws and policies at the local, state, and federal levels that ensure access to abortion and full bodily autonomy and that do not force people to seek out unsafe abortions. Candidates should also ensure that the U.S. does not enact laws or policies that enable the violation of the rights of millions of people globally to health, information, free speech, and even life, including policies related to U.S. health assistance, and should repeal those that do.
All U.S. government officials and candidates for office must do their part to ensure that the U.S. upholds the human rights of immigrants, refugees, and people seeking asylum. People have the right under international law to seek asylum – regardless of their manner of entry – and they should be welcomed into the United States without having to wait in danger in Mexico, be detained in abusive, deadly detention centers, or be faced with homelessness when they arrive.
Candidates should promote policies that restore access to asylum and respect the rights of refugees and migrants while also strongly denouncing language around migration grounded in racism and white nationalism. Addressing the global displacement crisis must include deep investment in refugee resettlement and complimentary humanitarian pathways, while upholding and expanding the right to seek asylum.
Protecting human rights in the United States means ensuring that everyone has a standard of living adequate for their well-being, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, or disability. Yet over 37 million people in the U.S. are living in poverty while tens of millions more live in a state of uncertainty and insecurity, and workers’ rights and labor movements are under attack. At the same time, extreme wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, and corporate profit margins are soaring. The U.S. has a powerful role to play and a responsibility to help advance economic rights both in the U.S. and internationally.
Candidates should commit to policies that require the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share of taxes; ensure that resources are allocated equitably to remedy systemic discrimination; ensure workers’ rights are respected, including the right to a living wage; and guarantee access to comprehensive, quality care for all people as a right and a public good. Candidates should support international policies related to debt cancellation, international tax reform, and development finance that would boost available resources for governments to pay for social protection and respect, protect, and fulfill economic rights for their people.
The U.S. is the world’s largest jailer, and mass incarceration disproportionately impacts Black, Indigenous, and other racialized groups, as do police use of lethal force and the death penalty.
Candidates should support a complete overhaul of the U.S. criminal legal system in line with human rights and commit to abolishing the death penalty and taking action to uniformly restrict the use of lethal force by police. Candidates should also support the passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act or similar reform bills and efforts to demilitarize police forces by ending programs that provide military equipment to law enforcement agencies. Candidates should work to decriminalize drug possession and sex work and should release all people incarcerated for them. Candidates should commit to ending abuses in the name of national security—including closing the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, ending indefinite detention, halting the unfair military commissions, and ensuring an end to unlawful killings—and support accountability, including for torture by the CIA.Â
The climate emergency is a human rights crisis of unprecedented proportions. Although the climate crisis is a global problem affecting everybody, it disproportionately impacts people who are already facing discrimination or marginalization due to structural inequalities. The U.S. is the world’s worst historic fossil fuel emitter, second worst current emitter, and worst per capita emitter. The U.S. government and businesses must therefore radically ramp up their efforts to end this crisis and end it the right way—through human rights and climate justice.
Candidates should commit to the U.S. quickly ending its use of fossil fuels and fully transitioning to green energy in a way that respects human rights and leaves no one behind domestically and globally. Candidates should call on U.S. companies including financial institutions to divest from fossil fuels and should support the U.S. paying its fair share to finance climate mitigation and adaptation globally, and to countries that need help financing their own just transition to green energy. Global green energy laws and policies must respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples, including the right to free, prior, and informed consent; workers’ rights; and the rights of communities impacted, such as the rights to housing, health, and a healthy environment.Â
The U.S. needs strong laws, regulations, and policies to ensure that businesses support—and do not undermine—human rights and that private gains are not prioritized above the public good. As the global leader in innovation, the decisions our elected leaders make to regulate technology, artificial intelligence, and business conduct will set the precedent for how the entire world navigates these uncharted waters.
Candidates should support laws and regulations that prevent, address, and remedy human rights harms and center the rights of workers and impacted communities, both in the U.S. and outside the country when U.S. companies operate globally. Candidates should support and strengthen international business and human rights frameworks domestically and globally through a strong U.S. National Action Plan and other relevant regulations and ensure that the power of the government’s purse is used to advance responsible business conduct. Candidates should support federal law to protect privacy rights and urge companies to prevent unlawful harassment and discrimination on their platforms, including gender-based violence. Candidates should support effective regulation around Artificial Intelligence, including Generative AI, to help ensure that companies developing these new technologies and tools do not amplify existing inequities and do not further undermine our rights. Candidates should support legislation that strengthens penalties for corporations that violate their operating permits and should support accountability and redress for past human rights abuses.
The right to free expression has historically been one of the most protected human rights in the United States. Yet today, free speech and protest movements around the world face backlash from elected leaders, candidates and non-state actors alike. Restrictions on protest, mass and targeted surveillance, censorship, and the misuse of force undermine the United States’ history as a country shaped by transformative protest movements, where diverse ideas can be freely shared.
Candidates should commit to enacting policies and laws that robustly protect the right to protest and a healthy civic space at home and abroad. That should include repealing U.S. state laws that infringe on the right to freedom of assembly; freeing prisoners of conscience; supporting human rights defenders; ensuring police respect, protect, and fulfill the right to protest of people taking action for human rights, and working to advance a global treaty to ban the trade of equipment often used for torture or other ill-treatment by law enforcement.Â
The U.S. is a global leader, but it has consistently and even increasingly rejected the application of human rights norms to itself or to its allies. It’s time for the U.S. to center human rights in its foreign policy, to object to other countries’ governments violating human rights – including our allies, and to make sure that U.S. support does not enable abuses of human rights or humanitarian law.
Candidates should commit to fully implementing all of the U.S. government’s human rights obligations, foreign and domestic. That includes supporting a National Human Rights Institution as well as ratifying and implementing the full spectrum of international human rights treaties. Candidates should commit to advancing human rights in U.S. foreign policy, including by centering human rights in diplomacy; raising concerns about the human rights records of other countries’ governments, including ally governments; ensuring that U.S. support, including funding, does not enable abuses of human rights or humanitarian law; and by funding a robust human rights ecosystem that includes sufficient staffing of the State Department and the key roles that monitor and advance human rights around the world, as well as consistent funding for and engagement with multilateral institutions to advance human rights globally.Â
HELP PROTECT HUMAN RIGHTS THIS NOVEMBER
The world is watching to see who the U.S. elects this November: leaders who will actively protect human rights or leaders who will actively deny them.