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The American Court Ordered Silencing Of The American Abused Children
The American Court Ordered Silencing Of The American Abused Children


American Novelist Talia Carner: "The Scandal In Our Own Backyard"
Related to country: United States
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

The Scandal in Our Own Backyard

http://www.vibrantnation.com/interviews/ 2008/08/26/ the-scandal-in-our-own-backyard/

The scandal in our own backyard by Talia Carner
Talia Carner, a novelist and an advocate for child victims of the legal system, is the author of Puppet Child, a legal drama about a mother trying to save her daughter from the legal system’s justice. Learn more by visiting her website, www.TaliaCarner. com.

“There is something bad happening to our children in family courts today that is causing them more harm than drugs, more harm than crime and even more harm than child molestation,” said Judge Watson L. White from Cobb County, Georgia, Superior Court.

In researching for my book, Puppet Child, I discovered that “something bad” to be the judges, especially when it comes to adjudicating allegations of child sexual abuse.

In Clarke v. Cowles in California, eight-year-old Loren (not her real name) told her caseworker and later her psychological evaluator in graphic detail how her father had sexually molested her. The first report was suppressed by the judge, the latter was never presented at the trial. The father was awarded full custody while the mother received supervised visitations on the unproven assumption that she had brainwashed her daughter. Years later, after the girl wrote repeatedly to her caseworker about molestation, a judge refused to hear the evidence because the question of sexual abuse had been decided five years before.

Loren is only one child out of thousands being handed to their abusers. According to The American Judges Foundation, in 70 percent of cases in which abusive men ask for custody, they succeed in gaining full or joint custody. This national scandal is made possible by the secrecy within the Family Court System and by public disbelief in the scope of the problem. The very system designed to safeguard helpless children has become a national disgrace as injustice has reached epidemic proportions.

Whatever you have ever known about democracy becomes irrelevant at the gate to family court. There, one person is judge, jury and executioner. Paradoxically, a family court judge is the one professional in the courtroom who is not required to be trained in domestic violence and child abuse. As a result, wrapped in their own mix of prejudices, religious beliefs, or misguided assumptions, all too many judges are ignorant about the dynamics of family abuse, ignorant about the nature of child molestation, and ignorant about the ways in which an abuser manipulates the courtroom as the arena where he can hand a woman the final blow by taking her children away.

Although studies such as the one by the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts Research in Denver—an organization which mothers’ groups claim is biased against women—shows that at least two thirds of sexual abuse allegations made by a child were proven to be substantiated (the one third unsubstantiated are not necessarily false.) Yet a study by the California Protective Parents Association found that 91 percent of fathers identified by their children as sexual predators received full or partial unsupervised custody—while in 54 percent of these same cases the non-abusing mother was placed on supervised visitations.

How is that possible? Here are some of the more glaring errors the courts perpetuate:

* Viewing children as property. When the crime of sexual abuse is committed upon a child who lives next door, the perpetrator is subject to harsh jail punishment. The same abuse committed upon one's own child is likely to result in a father getting sole custody. Behind this unfair ruling is the lingering feudal tradition that regards children as the property of their fathers.

* Mistaking controlling men for loving fathers. Used to getting their way and given to expressions of anger, controlling men fight hard in the court they regard as a boxing ring. Having seen too many men walk away from their children, judges often mistake for love a father’s unwillingness to let go of the child who has become both a sexual object and a weapon against a mother trying to get away from her husband’s control.

* Favoring the Parental Alienation Syndrome theory. PAS maintains that a child has been brainwashed to give false testimony. Not listed in the American Psychiatric Association manual, PAS is refuted and considered bogus theory by nationally recognized academic and clinical institutions— and by a 1999 Congressional act (VAWA). In fact, the lone advocate who coined the term, Richard Gardner, has also written that “pedophilia is natural.” Nevertheless, increasingly, legions of children are removed from their mothers’ care under the PAS theory.

* Tolerance of child sexual abuse. A Tennessee judge granted visitation rights to Ralph Gonnella two weeks after he had been arrested for taking sexually explicit photographs of his seven-year-old son. In California, Manuel Saavedra, a convicted sex offender who had pleaded guilty to lewd conduct with a child was awarded custody of his two daughters. All across America, convicted pedophiles—a crime known for its high rate of recidivism —are given access to their children.

* Refusing to stigmatize a man as a pedophile. A 1996 report by The American Psychological Association states, “women seldom make false reports of child abuse or battering.” Yet in case after case, when a father is found to be sexually abusive, judges suppress evidence. While many judges, many of whom are fathers, do not truly believe that sexual abuse exists, they also do not wish to venture into the criminal arena of pedophilia due to overlapping jurisdiction between civil and criminal courts.

* Not following the law. In demanding burden of proof of sexual molestation that supercedes the required “preponderance of evidence” and instead seeking the criminal definition of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” judges often demand dates, times or witnesses that are impossible for a child to provide. Interestingly, the same judges demand no proof when speculating that at the roots of the sexual abuse complaint is the mother’s coaching the child.

* Misogyny. In Virginia, Kathy Wade was told by the judge handing Kathy’s two-year-old daughter to the sexually abusive father, “This is what you get when you don’t have a lawyer.” In Florida, Judge Paul Marko told Marianne Price: "The singles' bars are full of guys… you go and find one.” In Michigan, Judge Gregory Pittman ordered a couple shackled together after the woman complained that her former husband had violated the order of protection. Routinely, American women are denied the right to due process, are subject to ex parte hearings, and are victims of perjury or illegal out-of-state jurisdictions.

Through it all, children are at a disadvantage because they are dependent upon mothers with no or poor legal representation and who are short on financial resources to wage protracted legal battles and appeals. (Professionals in the field report increasing support for men from well-financed fathers’ groups.) Moreover, men, poised and collected and surrounded by a legal team, “look good” in court when compared with frightened, distraught mothers, whom judges often view as hysterical, paranoid and vindictive. Yet all across the nation, behind every case in which a woman’s constitutional rights are being ignored in family court there are children needing protection. Instead, they receive a life sentence without parole.

Public disbelief guards the system from exposure. There are child services, therapists, and legal guardians who commit atrocious mistakes. But ultimately, the untrained judges are the ones responsible for saving the children. While I met compassionate family court judges, the shocking overall picture of injustice indicates that they are in the minority. Until the public grasps the scope of the scandal in our own backyard and holds judges accountable for the grand scale in which children are being removed from the custody of good mothers to be placed with pedophiles, we are facing a national shame of catastrophic proportions.

Talia Carner, an advocate for child victims of the legal system, is the author of Puppet Child, a legal drama about a mother trying to save her daughter from the legal system’s justice. Visit Talia's site,www.TaliaCarne r.com.
Learn more about child abuse issues on Talia's website
Tags: abuse, abuses, child, civil, constitutional, discrimination, domestic, human, rights, violence

October 20, 2008 | 5:58 PM Comments  0 comments


The American Advocate Boardmember Martin Luther King Jr’s Daughter In Law: Pushed To The Alter
Related to country: United States
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Executive Summary Re: Bush Administration: Pushed To The Alter

Pushed to the Altar: by Dr. Jean V. Hardisty
Administration marriage promotion initiatives (August 2007)

Executive Summary

January, 2008

This report is the result of a two-year investigation by political
scientist Jean Hardisty into the George W. Bush Administration' s
marriage promotion and fatherhood initiatives. Dr. Hardisty locates
these initiatives within the context of the Right's family values
ideology and investigates their scope, scale, intellectual and
operational origins, merits, and outcomes. Pushed to the Altar: The
Right Wing Roots of Marriage Promotion is the most comprehensive
examination to date of the ideological roots of these programs.*
Order Online Now!
In 2001 the newly installed Administration of George W. Bush
appointed Wade Horn as Assistant Secretary for Children and Families
at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The appointment
presaged a substantial shift in federal social welfare policy. Horn
had served as the titular head of the rightist fatherhood movement
during the 1990s. At HHS, he was to use the Administration' s
redefined and expanded faith-based initiatives (among other means) to
support organizations that encourage women - especially welfare
recipients - to marry their way out of poverty.

The Administration' s success in promoting this agenda can be seen in
Congress' allocation of $100 million annually for marriage promotion
programs over fiscal years 2006–2010 (a total of $500 million) as
part of welfare reauthorization in the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act.
Such Congressional funding for marriage promotion was preceded, and
continues to be supplemented, by a variety of Executive Branch and
state government grant programs.

Wade Horn's appointment to HHS illustrates the close ties between the
Bush Administration and various right-wing opinion makers,
intellectuals, advocacy groups, and mass-based organizations. Since
2001, Horn and The Heritage Foundation have been leading strategists
of the Right's agenda for "welfare reform." For the fatherhood
movement, conservative opponents of liberal antipoverty programs, and
the Christian Right, the Bush Administration has provided a golden
opportunity to promote marriage as a cure for poverty,
and "responsible fatherhood" as a means to restore community health
as they envision it.

What follows is a summary of the findings in Pushed to the Altar: The
Right Wing Roots of Marriage Promotion.

The arguments in favor of marriage and fatherhood promotion as a cure
for poverty are ultimately ideological in nature. There is no solid
evidence from the social sciences that marriage results in a higher
income for poor women.

The George W. Bush Administration' s ideology, policies, and programs
on marriage and fatherhood show how thoroughly politicized U.S.
welfare policy has become. Conservatives who maintain that marriage
and fatherhood will cure poverty are relying on two major sources:
the analysis of sociologist George Gilder - specifically Gilder's
assertion that marriage and fatherhood channel men's aggression and
lack of work ethic toward work and maintaining the family; and the
late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 government report, in
which he concluded that female-headed households were dysfunctionaland that the African-American community was plagued
by "fatherlessness, " resulting in a culture of pathology. These are
examples of bad science: reducing the explanation for phenomena as
complex as family formation and poverty alleviation to one single
causal factor: heterosexual marriage.

The assertion that marriage will cure poverty and end fatherlessness
is simply unproven. The Administration' s agenda is to
replace "liberal" programs that are known to raise people out of
poverty with programs that advance conservatives' social and economic
goals but have no record of reducing poverty.

Government marriage promotion experiments are funded at the expense
of proven poverty relief programs.

As federal and state allocations for marriage promotion and
fatherhood programs have dramatically increased, welfare benefits
themselves have steadily fallen. While reducing welfare benefits,
implementing "disincentives" for welfare recipients to have children
(such as the "child exclusion" provision), and implementing a five-
year lifetime cutoff for welfare recipients, the Bush Administration,
Congress, and some states now lavish money on untested and unproven
fatherhood and marriage promotion experiments. This redirection of
benefits intended for lowincome families and those unable to meet
their own needs is the equivalent of taking food from the table of
the hungry. Policies known to alleviate poverty - subsidized housing,
health care, child care, and the provision of meaningful educational
and job training opportunities - are not being vigorously promoted
under the present Administration.

Government funding for marriage promotion projects exceeds $100
million annually.

Executive Branch departments, including HHS and the Justice
Department, make marriage promotion grants. State governments also
fund a number of marriage promotion programs - some paid for with
federal Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) block grants and some
funded by the states themselves. Finally, Congress has allocated
substantial resources for marriage promotion programs. The
multiplicity of funding sources and the commingling of federal faith-
based and marriage promotion initiatives makes it difficult to
establish exactly how much state and federal money goes to support
marriage promotion programs. We do know the following:

The 2005 Deficit Reduction Act allocated $100 million annually for
marriage promotion programs and $50 million for fatherhood programs
for fiscal years 2006–2010, or a total of $750 million;
The Administration' s Charitable Choice Fund, which in 2004 had a
budget of $2 billion, has made grants in furtherance of marriage
promotion;
Some of the $30 million, HHS-administered Compassion Capital Fund
underwrites marriage promotion projects;
HHS' Healthy Marriage Initiative has made grants both before and
since passage of the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act; and
State funds, as well as federal TANF funds, are directed to state
marriage programs.
Government-funded marriage promotion and fatherhood programs are
varied and numerous.

Marriage promotion programs developed by the Bush Administration,
with the assistance of The Heritage Foundation and other rightist
think tanks, are now being implemented across the country, including:
Public advertising campaigns and high school programs on the value of
marriage;Marriage education for nonmarried pregnant women and nonmarried
expectant fathers; Premarital education and marriage skills training for engaged couples
and for couples or individuals interested in marriage;
Marriage enhancement and marriage skills training programs for
married couples;Divorce reduction programs that teach relationship skills;
Marriage mentoring programs which use married couples as role models
and mentors in at-risk communities; andPrograms to reduce the disincentives to marriage in means-tested aid
programs, if offered in conjunction with any activity described
above.Government marriage promotion initiatives are intertwined with the
dramatic erosion of Church/State separation under the Bush
Administration' s faith-based initiatives.
An increase in federal funding for marriage promotion has
corresponded with the Bush Administration' s funding for faith-based
initiatives. A line item in the 2002 federal budget created the
HHSadministered $30 million "Compassion Capital Fund" to channel
federal money to faith-based groups at the local level. By 2006, the
Administration was disbursing $2.1 billion to various faith-based
organizations and programs.

Although the federal government has long funded religious charities,
it previously stipulated that they receive the money through a
secular arm and adhere to strict rules for separation of church and
state, including bans on religiously- based discrimi- nation in hiring
and worship in programs funded. The Bush Administration has resisted
these restrictions and, failing to win Congressional approval,
implemented its "Charitable Choice" initiative by administrative
fiat. The Administration is currently facing lawsuits, which charge
that some faith-based organizations supported by this Fund are
illegally introducing the Bible into government-funded programs.

The arguments for government marriage promotion programs often
reflect racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes, and the programs
themselves disproportionately target communities of color -
especially African Americans.

The Right has been able to mobilize the racial resentment of large
numbers of White voters by stereotyping welfare recipients as African-
American and demonizing them as women of loose sexual morals who are
prone to defraud government agencies. Avoiding explicit statements
about the inferiority of people of color, the Right instead developed
an analysis of virtue and achievement as "colorblind" - adhering to
individuals regardless of race. The Right refuses to acknowledge
systemic racism and gender discrimination and characterizes poverty
or exclusion as the fault of the individual.

Because many families in low-income communities of color do not
conform to the model heterosexual, nuclear family configuration,
conservative marriage and fatherhood promoters view such communities
as their most challenging project. HHS' Healthy Families Initiative
administers special initiatives for African-American, Hispanic, and
Native American communities that promote the nuclear family model and
emphasize the father as the principal determinant of the success of
both children and the family. Thus, the State is constructing
marriage as the only acceptable means of family formation.

Government marriage promotion efforts emerged from and reinforce the
work of rightist fatherhood groups and Christian Right organizations.

Central to the Right's identity is its crusade to restore the
heterosexual nuclear family as the only approved social unit worthy
of the name "family." By 2000 and the arrival of the George W. Bush
Administration, the Right was able to mount strong campaigns, carried
out by the movement's infrastructure, to bring that ideological
commitment to bear on public policy. Key examples of such campaigns
include:

The Southern Baptist Convention's Resolution on Ordination and the
Role of Women in Ministry; The Promise Keepers movement, with its massive revival rallies
emphasizing the importance of men assuming leadership within their
marriages and families; The Christian Coalition's Contract with the American Family, which
anticipated the Bush Administration' s Charitable Choice initiative;
Covenant marriage, a voluntary option that makes divorce nearly
impossible; and Opposition to same-sex marriage, as with passage of the federal
Defense of Marriage Act (1996). As of 2006, 40 states had enacted
laws denying recognition of same-sex marriage.
While the momentum for conservative marriage promotion has come from
the Right, liberals and centrists have not vigorously opposed it and
sometimes have supported it.

An overlooked element of the punitive 1996 welfare reform legislation
signed by President Bill Clinton was its emphasis on marriage as a
means to lift recipients out of poverty. The bill opened the door to
the use of TANF money to promote "healthy marriage."

As liberals and centrists became a minority voice in 2000, and their
support for existing welfare programs weakened, the public
increasingly supported a stereotype of welfare recipients as people
undeserving of help and incapable of benefiting from it. A strong
antipoverty Democratic platform and a wellfunded and highly active
welfare rights movement will be required to reverse the damage done
by "welfare reform."

Marriage and fatherhood promotion also have liberal, and even
progressive, variants and proponents.
Progressive fatherhood and marriage organizations of color are less
attached to the traditional nuclear family model than are
conservative fatherhood organizations. Such organizations encourage
fathers, whether married or not, to become more involved in their
children's lives, both emotionally and financially, and to develop a
better relationship with a child's mother.

A small movement of profeminist fatherhood organizations works on
issues such as: the problems that male supremacy causes within the
family; how the politics of masculinity often appears to condone
violence in U.S. culture; and their own privilege as men.

Conclusions

The measure of a social movement's lasting success is the extent to
which its ideology and policy proposals become dominant in the
country, and eventually become law. When George W. Bush assumed the
Presidency in 2000, the contemporary Political Right for the first
time had control of both the Executive Branch and Congress, creating
an opportunity for it, as a movement, to reap the full benefits of
success and power. Primary among these benefits has been
implementation of the programs and policies that reflect the
movement's ideology.

Marriage is a boon to some people and a nightmare for others. Rather
than acknowledging the complexity of ever-accelerating modernity and
the changes for better and worse that it brings, the Right would have
government revive television's "Ozzie and Harriet" version of the
1950s heterosexual nuclear family. Although government could play a
constructive role in providing support services for low-income women
and men, it will not do so if the programs are driven by hidden
ideological and/or religious agendas rather than a commitment to
safety, self-empowerment, and financial security.

It is up to the public and policy makers to take a stand against
ideologically- driven programs and to demand implementation of proven
methods of addressing poverty, remembering that the social and
economic harm of the Right's programs are visited on the most
vulnerable women and their families.

Policy Recommendations:
1. A return to policies known to alleviate poverty - subsidized
housing, health care, child care, and the provision of educational
and job training opportunities, provided without resentment, in a
supportive environment, and with federal money;

2. Federal support for: groups fighting poverty; groups advocating
for the rights of welfare recipients; and groups providing services
to low-income people without racial, religious, sexual preference, or
gender discrimination;

3. Protecting women from violence (now acknowledged in current
marriage promotion policies) should be at the center of all
government and private antipoverty programs;

4. The elimination of the five-years-in- a-lifetime limit on welfare
benefits;

5. The elimination of the "child exclusion provision" or "family
cap," and the "illegitimacy bonus," changes that would defend the
right of low-income women to bear and raise children;

6. Comprehensive federally-funded jobs, housing, and health care
programs that address the needs of those low-income families that
fall "between the cracks" of the current, punitive Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)
guidelines;

7. The reversal of exclusionary provisions that deny social services
to documented and undocumented immigrants;

8. Objective social science research to examine the social and
economic consequences of the expenditure of federal money to promote
marriage among low-income women and men; and

9. A federally-funded public education effort to counteract the last
twenty-five years of ideologically driven demonization of low-income
people, especially welfare recipients, with special emphasis on
institutional and systemic causes of poverty.
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
----------
* The second half of this Marriage Promotion Report Series is the
forthcoming: Marriage as a Cure for Poverty? Social Science Through
a "Family Values" Lens (Somerville, MA and Oakland, CA: Political
Research Associates and Women of Color Resource Center: 2008). It
will examine conservative marriage promoters' questionable attempts
to find support for their policy recommendations in social science
literature.

here is the link to the article
http://www.publicey e.org/pushedtoth ealtar/index. html
Tags: rights, abuse, child, civil, constitutional, discrimination, domestic, human, violence

October 14, 2008 | 2:14 PM Comments  0 comments


The American U.S. Justice Department files 40 page brief Against American Murdered Abused Small Children Of American Battered Mother In International Human Rights Court...
Related to country: United States
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Human Rights Court Say US Didn’t help Battered Mother & Murdered Abused
..> IACHR-update; Jessica Gonzales v. U.S. - Favorable Admissibility Decision


Below is an email from Carrie Bettinger-Lopez, our co-counsel on Jessica Gonzales' case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, with an update about recent developments.

Sandra Park, Staff Attorney
Women's Rights Project | American Civil Liberties Union
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10004
T: 212.519.7871 | F: 212.549.2580 | spark@aclu.org

________________________________



For those of you who have been following the case of Jessica Gonzales v. ..:NAMESPACE PREFIX = ST1 />United States, before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, I am pleased to inform you that we received a favorable decision on Friday, October 5 declaring Jessica Lenahan's (formerly Gonzales) case admissible. This is the best decision we could have hoped for.

The decision says that Ms. Lenahan (Gonzales) exhausted all domestic remedies (i.e. that she pursued every potential legal avenue available to her but had those doors closed to her). The decision also indicates that countries in the Americas, including the U.S., are responsible under the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man for protecting victims of domestic violence from private acts of violence. This is the first time that the Commission has ever made such a pronouncement. This admissibility decision is the first phase of a two-step process before the Commission. The next step is the merits phase, where the Commission will decide whether the US and the Castle Rock Police Department/Colorado violated Ms. Lenahan (Gonzales') and her children's human rights. (Specifically, the rights to life, non-discrimination, family life/unity, due process, petition the government, and the rights of domestic violence victims and their children to special protections ).

For more information on the Gonzales case, and to view the Commission's admissibility decision, go to http://www.cidh.org/annualrep/2007eng/USA1490.05eng.htm (Spanish version forthcoming). The decision is also available at https://www.law.columbia.edu/focusareas/clinics/humanrights97614 or http://www.aclu.org/womensrights/violence/32105lgl20071005.html .

To view Ms. Gonzales' testimony before the Inter-American Commission in March 2007, see http://www.oas.org/OASpage/videosondemand/home_eng/videos_query.asp?sCodigo=07-0041or http://www.aclu.org/womensrights/violence/gonzalesvusa.html.

Below is an article that came out today in the National Law Journal about the decision. Also, here is a link to a Channel 4 newscast from last night featuring Jessica. http://cbs4denver.com/topstories/local_story_281095916.html

Several amicus briefs are currently being drafted on the following topics: the children's rights dimension of the case; the protections and limitations of VAWA and obstacles that DV survivors still face in obtaining government assistance and support; framing domestic violence as a form of torture.


Please contact me and Araceli Martínez-Olguín (amartinez-olguin@aclu.org) if you or your organization are interested in signing on to those briefs.

Further information on the case is below. Thanks for all your support. Apologies for cross-postings.

All best,

Carrie (on behalf of Jessica's legal team)

Caroline Bettinger-López | Human Rights Fellow & Attorney
Columbia Law School | Human Rights Institute & Human Rights Clinic
435 W. 116th Street, Box C-16 | New York, NY 10027
Phone: (212) 854-8364 | Fax: (212) 854-3554 | Email: c.lopez@law.columbia.edu


Further information on the case is below.



Rights panel to hear U.S. domestic violence case

Marcia Coyle / Staff reporter
October 15, 2007
..

Jessica Gonzales poses with a portrait of her three daughters, from left, Katheryn, Rebecca and Leslie.
Image: Craig F. Walker / The Denver Post



WASHINGTON - The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has agreed to decide whether the United States violated the rights of a domestic violence victim whose three children were killed when local police failed to enforce a restraining order against her former husband.

The complaint by Jessica Lenahan (formerly Jessica Gonzales) is the first brought by a domestic violence victim against the United States for international human rights violations.

On Oct. 4, the commission ruled her complaint "admissible," which is akin to finding jurisdiction, after rejecting arguments by the U.S. Department of State, including that Lenahan had not exhausted available remedies, and, significantly, that the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man imposes no affirmative duty on states to actually prevent the crimes committed by Lenahan's former husband.

Officials at the State Department were unavailable to comment because of the Oct. 8 federal holiday.
Lenahan's legal odyssey began in 1999 when she filed a lawsuit against the Castle Rock, Colo., police department seeking to hold it liable for failing to respond to her repeated calls and appearances for help after her husband abducted her children. Her daughters were found dead in their father's pickup truck after he was killed in a shootout with police at police headquarters hours after their mother sought police assistance.

A landmark case

Her lawsuit attracted national and international attention when it was reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which held in June 2005 that she had no constitutional right to police enforcement of her restraining order. That December, Lenahan filed her petition with the Inter-American Commission, charging that police inaction and the Supreme Court decision violated her human rights.

"This case is not just about Jessica Gonzales, although it clearly is very important for her," said Caroline Bettinger-Lopez of Columbia Law School's Human Rights Clinic, who, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, represents Lenahan.

It is important for victims of domestic violence and intimate-partner violence in the United States and throughout the world, she said, adding, "We've gotten calls from the United Nations and organizations around world who see this case as a landmark one on the duty of states to protect victims of domestic violence."

The admissibility decision itself has "immediate importance," according to Bettinger-Lopez, because it is the first time the commission has recognized that the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man imposes affirmative obligations by countries in the Americas to protect individuals from private acts of violence.

The commission was created in 1959 and is expressly authorized to investigate allegations of human rights violations by members of the Organization of American States (OAS), which includes the United States.

'Compulsory jurisdiction'

The commission has jurisdiction to receive complaints against any OAS member state where it is upholding the rights set forth in the 1948 American declaration, said international law scholar Robert Goldman of American University Washington College of Law.

"The commission is the only organization in the world that has compulsory jurisdiction over the United States," he said. "The only way to escape jurisdiction is to denounce the OAS charter."

Having survived the "admissibility" phase, Lenahan's case moves into the merits phase, in which there will be additional briefing and possibly another hearing. The commission may attempt a "friendly settlement," noted Goldman, a former commission member.

The United States does not have a good record of compliance with commission recommendations, said Goldman. But if Lenahan prevails, he added, it will not be a Pyrrhic victory.

"The commission articulates standards with respect to very important rights," Goldman said. "What you'll find is a state that can't comply for a variety of reasons now might comply in the future."

It also puts the United States, he added, in a very uncomfortable position. Congress mandates an annual human rights report that often points the finger at other countries' practices.

"To the extent an authoritative body finds violations by the United States and it does not comply, it resonates," Goldman said.

But for now, Bettinger-Lopez said, a "new legal avenue" has been established. "It opens a door for domestic violence victims in search of vindication, whose legal options have recently been limited by harsh court rulings in the United States."

http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1191834195781



CASE SUMMARY

In June 1999, Jessica Gonzales' estranged husband abducted her three daughters, in violation of a domestic violence restraining order. Ms. Gonzales called and met with the police repeatedly to report the abduction and restraining order violation. Unfortunately, her calls went unheeded. Ten hours after her first call to the police, Ms. Gonzales' estranged husband arrived at the police station and opened fire. The police immediately shot and killed Mr. Gonzales, and then discovered the bodies of the Gonzales children - Leslie, 7, Katheryn, 8, and Rebecca, 10 - in the back of his pickup truck. Ms. Gonzales filed a lawsuit against the police, but in June 2005, the Supreme Court found that she had no constitutional right to police enforcement of her restraining order. In December 2005, Ms. Gonzales filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging that the police's actions and the Supreme Court's decision violated her human rights. This was the first individual complaint brought by a victim of domestic violence against the United States for human rights violations.

On March 2, 2007, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights heard the case of Jessica Gonzales v. United States . Jessica Lenahan (formerly Gonzales) provided testimony. This was the first time that she was afforded an opportunity to tell her story to a tribunal. Ms. Lenahan is represented by the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The Commission is expected to issue a decision before the year's end.

To view or listen to the hearing, download the video or audio webcast at: http://www.oas.org/OASpage/videosondemand/home_eng/videos_query.asp?sCodigo=07-0041 (video) or http://www.cidh.org/Audiencias/Audioshearings127PS.htm (audio, 4th entry under March 2).

Jessica Lenahan's statement (which she read at the hearing) can be found at:
http://www.law.columbia.edu/null/Jessica+Statement+-+IACHR+hrg?exclusive=filemgr.download&file_id=1391&showthumb=0 or http://www.aclu.org/womensrights/violence/29338res20070302.html.

More information on the Gonzales case (including the Petition submitted to the Inter-American Commission and additional briefing and exhibits) can be found at:

http://www.law.columbia.edu/focusareas/clinics/humanrights97614 or http://www.aclu.org/womensrights/violence/gonzalesvusa.html..:NAMESPACE PREFIX = O />
Tags: abuse, abuses, child, civil, constitutional, discrimination, domestic, human, rights, violence

October 14, 2008 | 2:08 PM Comments  0 comments