Guantanamo, Drones, and the Courts: A Conversation About National Security Law
This year has seen significant developments in national security issues of interest to South Asian Americans. Important D.C. Circuit decisions have challenged the scope of the Guanatanamo military commissions. These rulings, along with a set of high-profile prosecutions, have triggered new questions about Guantanamo’s legal status and role. Separately, the Obama Administration’s recently released white paper on drone policy has raised its own set of important legal questions.

Panelists:

• Wells C. Bennett is an attorney in Washington, D.C., and a Visiting Fellow in National Security Law at the Brookings Institution.
• Steve Vladeck is a professor of law and the associate dean for scholarship at American University Washington College of Law.
• Raha Wala is an Advocacy Counsel in the Law and Security Program, Human Rights First

Human Rights First cordially invites you to the launch of the 2013 Free The Press Campaign, a program by the Department of State highlighting threats to media freedom and freedom of expression worldwide.

Featuring

Remarks by Tara Sonenshine, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs

With Uzra Zeya, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor

Moderated by Elisa Massimino, President and CEO of Human Rights First

A livestream of the event will be available on this page on April 25 at 2:30pm. A question and answer session will follow the opening remarks. We encourage you to submit questions in advance to: events@humanrightsfirst.org

Where:
National Press Building
529 14th Street NW, Suite 800
Washington, DC 20045

Livestream: A livestream of the event will be available on this page on April 25

Are You On The List? The Legal Implications of Targeted Killing
This panel addressed the legality of the U.S. policy of extrajudicial killing under International Humanitarian Law, The Law of Armed Conflict and U.S. Constitutional Law.

MODERATOR: Pamela Stephens, Professor, Vermont Law School

PANELISTS: Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow, CATO Institute; Robert F. Turner, Professor, University of Virginia School of Law; Gabor Rona, International Legal Director, Human Rights First; Chris Jenks, Director of the Criminal Justice Clinic, Assistant Professor of Law, Southern Methodist University; Michael Lewis, Professor, Ohio Northern University, Pettit College of Law.

Panel: The Laws Governing Targeted Killing and Non-traditional Warfare

What are the ethical and civil liberties questions underlying the use of drones for killing? What are the implications for foreign policy and U.S. national security in terms of the potential for blowback and proliferation? Is the political consensus surrounding drone warfare greater than on detention and interrogation policies? What effect would a more transparent approach to targeted killing have?

Speakers: David Cole, Professor of Law at Georgetown University; Pir Zubair Shah, Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations; Hina Shamsi, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project; Gabor Rona, International Legal Director of Human Rights First; and Steve Coll (moderator), New Yorker Staff Writer and President and CEO of The New America Foundation.

Watch the testimony here on Wednesday, February 27 at 9am EST.

Human Rights First has long maintained that antisemitic violence, as well as other forms of hate crime, should not be seen simply as the problems of individual victims or their communities. Hate crime must be viewed and responded to as a serious violation of human rights. Governments have an obligation to confront these abuses, and there is much more they could be doing.

The United States is a global leader in combatting antisemitism and other hate crime. In her testimony, Massimino urges the committee to continue this leadership by:

• Elevating the importance of religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy.
• Establishing an interagency mechanism to deploy strategically the resources and programs from across the different U.S. government agencies to combat hate crime globally.
• Elevating the efforts to combat antisemitism as an important component of Bilateral Engagement.
• Maintaining the international leadership of the United States in multilateral forums, particularly the OSCE.

Read Massimino’s full testimony.

Watch the panel:

Watch the panel:

Yesterday’s roundtable conversations led by Massimino focused on understanding the opportunities and challenges of tracing, disrupting and holding accountable “enablers”, those actors- countries, companies and individuals- who provide the material resources that perpetrators rely on to commit their crimes. This topic included an exploration of the concrete steps that Human Rights First is taking to highlight the role of enablers in mass atrocities along with an examination of the ways the United States government, through its new Atrocity Prevention Board, can adopt the enabler strategy as a key tool that can be used in the critical time between diplomacy and military intervention.

Participants included members of the human rights NGO community, U.S. government officials, academics and analysts.

View the Event Invitation

Human Rights First’s Melina Milazzo, advocacy counsel for our Law and Security Program, went on Al Jazeera English to debunk Rodriguez’ false claims that torture led to bin Laden.

Al Jazeera English