Rights body to challenge US state voting laws before UNHRC
*Some US states suppressing votes of
minorities and others
*Twenty one m Americans don’t possess
photo identification
Taking a page from its past, the National Association for the
Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) will go before a United Nations
panel in Switzerland next week to argue that new voting laws approved by
some US states violate civil and human rights by suppressing the votes
of minorities and others.
A delegation from the venerable civil rights organization will
present its case in Geneva on Wednesday before the United Nations Human
Rights Council, a body that normally addresses troubles in places, such
as, Libya, Syria and the Ivory Coast.
The Geneva appearance is part of an NAACP strategy rooted in the
1940s and 1950s, when the group looked to the United Nations and the
international community for support in its domestic battle for civil
rights for blacks and against lynching.
“It was in 1947 that W.E.B. Dubois delivered his speech and appealed
to the world at the U.N.,” NAACP president Benjamin Todd Jealous said
Thursday.
“Now, like then, the principal concern is voting rights. The past
year more states in this country have passed more laws pushing more
voters out of the ballot box than any point since Jim Crow.” Supporters
of the new laws say the action by the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People is a curious move, but one that isn’t
likely to produce tangible results.
“The NAACP can appeal to whatever body it chooses to — the U.N.
doesn’t run our elections,” said Catherine Engelbrecht, president of
True the Vote, a tea party-founded anti-voter group that’s seeking to
mobilize thousands of volunteers to work as poll watchers and to
validate existing voter-registration lists. “It has been talked to death
whether or not (requiring) ID disenfranchises anyone.”
Jealous acknowledged that the Human Rights Council has no direct
authority over American states, but he hopes that it can exert influence
through public pressure.
“The power of the U.N. on state governments historically is to shame
them and to put pressure on the U.S. government to bring them into line
with global standards for democracy, best practices for democracy,
that’s where we are,” he said.
“There are plenty of examples — segregation of the U.S. to apartheid
in South Africa to the death penalty here in the U.S. of global outrage
having an impact.”
Jealous said the U.N. panel will hear Wednesday from two Americans
impacted by the new laws: a convicted felon who served her time and a
University of Texas student who might not be able to vote this year
because of a law approved by the state legislature requiring voters to
show government-approved photo identification.
Since last year, 15 states have passed new voting laws; currently 38
states, including some of those 15, are weighing legislation to require
people to show government-approved photo identification or provide proof
of citizenship before casting their ballots.
Other changes adopted or under consideration by states include
restricting voter registration drives by third-party groups such as the
League of Women Voters and the NAACP; curtailing or eliminating early
voting; doing away with same-day voter registration; and rescinding the
right to vote of convicted felons who have served their time.
Proponents of the new laws say they are needed to protect the
integrity of the vote, to prevent illegal immigrants from casting
ballots, and to clamp down on voter fraud, although several studies
indicate that systemic voter fraud is negligible.
The NAACP, civil liberties groups, voting experts and some lawmakers
say the new laws smack of poll taxes and literacy tests — devices that
in previous generations blocked blacks from voting.
A study last year by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice
said the new laws “may sharply tilt the political terrain for the 2012
election” by restricting voting access to five million people, most of
them minority, elderly, young or low-income earners. States that have
adopted new laws account for 171 electoral votes in 2012 or 63 percent
of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency, the Brennan
Center report said.
The study also found that more than 21 million Americans don’t
possess government-issued photo identification. The NAACP estimates that
about 25 percent of African-Americans nationwide don’t possess the
proper documentation to meet ID requirements.
The Justice Department is scrutinizing some of the laws under Section
5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which requires approval of voting law
changes in 16 mostly Southern states because they have histories of
racial discrimination.
The department’s Civil Rights Division rejected as discriminatory a
South Carolina law requiring voters to show government-issued photo ID.
The state filed a lawsuit last month against the Justice Department over
its decision.
The department is expected to make a determination on Texas’ voting
law on Monday. Justice Department officials filed court papers last week
challenging Florida’s voting law changes.
Opponents of the new laws have been waging a multi-front battle
either to get the measures killed or to prepare those potentially
affected by the laws for what they will need to do to register and vote.
The Congressional Black Caucus, for example, is scheduled to hold a
symposium in May in Washington for a nationwide gathering of ministers
to explain how the new laws could impact their efforts to mobilize
parishioners to vote.
In 2008, several black churches organized “Souls to the Polls” drives
in which worshipers took advantage of early voting periods and went en
masse straight from Sunday services to their local polling stations to
vote.
CBC members also plan to conduct a multi-city voter education tour in
May, and some caucus members will launch voter education bus tours from
the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C.
But the NAACP’s Geneva journey takes the voting law battle in a
different but familiar — direction.
After World War II revealed the atrocities of the white supremacist
Nazi regime, the NAACP saw an opportunity to tell the international
community about the unequal treatment of African-Americans in the U.S.
In October 1947, the NAACP filed “An Appeal to the World” at the United
Nations, penned mostly by Dubois.
The U.N.’s Commission on Human Rights rejected the appeal in December
1947, but the NAACP’s New York office was flooded with requests from
around the world for copies of the petition, according to a Stanford
University timeline on the African-American civil rights struggle.
“When African-Americans went to the U.N. laying out a whole host of
human rights violations, countries like India went, ‘Whoa, what’s going
on here,” said Carol Anderson, an Emory University professor and author
of “Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American
Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955.” “But because of the Cold War at
the time, the U.N. was frightened by this, and the United States worked
very hard to keep human rights out of the U.N.”
Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a civil rights movement veteran, said he
doesn’t know what type of reception the NAACP will receive in Geneva,
but he applauds the organization for trying.
“If this is what it takes to bring attention to what’s happening, and
not just in the South, it’s probably what should be done,” he said. |