SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
senate republicans
120+ Groups Warn Biden Against Backing Sanctions for ICC
Doing so would align the U.S. "with authoritarian tactics of threatening judges and independent judicial institutions," the groups cautioned.
May 23, 2024
As the Biden administration signals its willingness to work with congressional Republicans to potentially sanction International Criminal Court officials over their pursuit of arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, more than 120 rights groups on Wednesday urged U.S. President Joe Biden to "oppose the threats and calls for punitive actions" emanating from Congress.
ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan said earlier this week that he has formally applied for arrest warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged "crimes of causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies, [and] deliberately targeting civilians in conflict," and Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh, and Mohammed Deif for alleged "extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape, and sexual assault in detention."
Referring to Senate Republicans' threats to retaliate against ICC officials if they issue arrest warrants for the Israelis—and Secretary of State Antony Blinken's stated willingness to work with GOP lawmakers on sanctions—the rights groups argued in a letter to Biden that acting on such efforts "would do grave harm to the interests of all victims globally and to the U.S. government's ability to champion human rights and the cause of justice."
"While the United States is not an ICC member country, Republican and Democratic administrations have supported the court in specific cases, and the U.S. has assisted arrest operations to bring justice to victims in central Africa," the groups noted. "Your own administration has recognized the court's essential role to address serious crimes in Ukraine and Darfur."
The letter condemns former U.S. President Donald Trump's sanctions targeting then-Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and other ICC officials over the court's effort to investigate U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan as "an affront to justice" that "threatened to undermine the ICC's effective functioning."
"Regrettably, those sanctions aligned the United States with authoritarian tactics of threatening judges and independent judicial institutions," the groups lamented.
The letter asserts:
The ability of the ICC to provide justice for victims requires full respect for its independence. A selective approach to judicial decisions undermines the credibility, and ultimately, the force of the law as a shield against human rights violations and abuses. Your administration appeared to recognize this in repealing the Trump-era sanctions, noting that U.S. concerns "would be better addressed through engagement with all stakeholders in the ICC process." We urge you to ensure that any disagreement about the court's process is pursued through proper judicial channels under the court's treaty.
U.S. and Israeli officials often note that neither country is a party to the Rome Treaty that established the ICC. However, the court has noted its "jurisdiction in relation to crimes committed on the territory of Palestine, including Gaza," as well as "over crimes committed by Palestinian nationals inside or outside Palestinian territory."
The groups' letter comes as the death toll from Israel's relentless 230-day assault on Gaza approaches 36,000, with more than 80,000 others wounded and at least 11,000 people missing and believed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of damaged or destroyed homes and other buildings throughout the embattled Palestinian enclave. Around 9 in 10 Gazans have also been forcibly displaced, with hundreds of thousands of refugees sheltering in the southern city of Rafah, where Israeli forces are now invading.
During an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour earlier this week, Khan said the ICC should represent "the triumph of law over brute force, grab what you can, take what you want, do what you will."
"We will not be dissuaded," he vowed.
The Biden White House and Republican Congress are considering sanctions against ICC Chief Prosecutor @KarimKhanQC as he seeks arrest warrants for their ally Benjamin Netanyahu. But Khan told me the court “will not be dissuaded”: pic.twitter.com/T6pBtjyX7f
— Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) May 23, 2024
The United Nations' International Court of Justice—which is weighing a wider genocide case filed by South Africa and supported by over 30 other nations—is expected to rule Friday on a related South African request for the tribunal to order a cease-fire in Gaza.
The U.N. Human Rights Council in March found "reasonable grounds to believe" that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a conclusion shared by at least hundreds of legal experts around the world.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Insufferable Islamophobia': Senate Dems Could Help GOP Tank 1st Muslim Fed Appeals Judge
"A bipartisan coalition in the U.S. Senate is about to nix this judicial nominee because he's Muslim," one advocate said.
Mar 15, 2024
Progressive and Muslim rights organizations spoke out in support of federal appellate court nominee Adeel Mangi on Friday after news broke that enough U.S. Senate Democrats might vote with Republicans to scupper his appointment.
President Joe Biden nominated Mangi, a well-respected New York-based trial lawyer, to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit on November 15. If confirmed, he would be the first Muslim to serve as a federal appeals judge. However, CNN reported on Thursday that several Senate Democrats and their staff had told the White House that there seemed to be insufficient votes to confirm him.
The news followed a controversial hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in December, in which Mangi, who was born in Pakistan, was asked to comment on both the September 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. and Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel. While the committee voted to advance him along party lines, the outcome of a full Senate vote is now in question.
"Someone as qualified as Adeel Mangi should have broad and enthusiastic support from the whole Senate."
"A bipartisan coalition in the U.S. Senate is about to nix this judicial nominee because he's Muslim," Jameel Jaffer, the director of Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute, posted on social media in response to the news.
Human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid said on social media that the move to vote against him was "insufferable Islamophobia and cowardice."
Rashid pointed out that seven of the judges nominated by former President Donald Trump were rated as "not qualified" by the American Bar Association (ABA), yet the Senate still voted to confirm them. Mangi, on the other hand, is "highly qualified" and "highly rated" and "instead even Senate Democrats are running away from him."
The ABA rates Mangi as "well-qualified," and Benchmark Litigation placed him on its 2024 and 2023 lists of the "Top 100 Trial Lawyers" in the country. He earned law degrees from both Oxford and Harvard and has had a successful career both representing corporate clients at the law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb, and Tyler and taking on pro bono cases.
One of his prominent pro bono victories involved Muslim communities who had been barred from building a mosque in two New Jersey towns. In another, he secured a settlement for the family of Karl Taylor, who died in a New York prison after being attacked by guards.
"Someone as qualified as Adeel Mangi should have broad and enthusiastic support from the whole Senate," People for the American Way posted in response to the CNN story. "Mangi has spent his career working pro bono for people who couldn't afford a lawyer and would be the first Muslim judge on the 3rd Circuit."
Muslim advocacy group Emgage Action urged the public to support Mangi's nomination and criticized the "overtly Islamophobic questioning" at his confirmation hearings.
"Call on your senators to swiftly move forward with his confirmation and advocate for Adeel Mangi's suitability for the federal bench!" the group said on social media.
One of the most vocal Republican opponents of Mangi's nomination is Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
Cruz was the one to ask him if he condemned "the atrocities of the Hamas terrorists," to which Mangi responded that the events of October 7 were "a horror." When Cruz then asked if he thought the attacks could be justified, Mangi answered, "I have no patience, none, for any attempts to justify or defend those events."
Cruz and other Republicans also questioned Mangi on his membership of the advisory board for the Rutgers Center for Security, Race, and Rights, which they claimed supported antisemitism because of speakers it had hosted, as NorthJersey.com reported. In response, Mangi said the advisory board only met once annually and discussed the center's academic research, not its programming.
At the time, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats denounced the Republicans' line of questioning on social media.
"Senate Judiciary Republicans reached a new low, hurling unfounded accusations of antisemitism at an historic Muslim American judicial nominee today. In fact, Adeel Mangi is a longtime advocate for religious liberty," the Democratic committee members wrote.
Several Jewish American groups have backed Mangi's nomination, and even the Anti-Defamation League, which has been criticized for adopting an overly broad definition of antisemitism that stigmatizes legitimate criticisms of Israeli policies, defended him against the Republican line of questioning.
"Just as associating Jewish Americans with certain views or beliefs regarding Israeli government actions would be deemed antisemitic, berating the first American Muslim federal appellate judicial nominee with endless questions that appear to have been motivated by bias toward his religion is profoundly wrong," the group wrote in a January statement.
In a social media post on Friday, Cruz seemed to steer his opposition to Mangi away from anything that could be construed as Islamophobic to instead paint him as a radical. Cruz shared a letter opposing his confirmation from the National Troopers Coalition over Mangi's role as an advisory board member of the Alliance of Families for Justice, which supports the family members of incarcerated individuals. However, the coalition argued Mangi's role on the board showed an anti-law enforcement bias.
"He is so far left that even some Democrats are opposing his nomination," Cruz wrote.
In response to the news that Democrats might vote against Mangi, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told CNN that the administration "continues to fight for his confirmation and to repudiate the vicious hate and bigotry with which he has been targeted because of his Muslim faith."
Bates called Mangi an "extraordinarily qualified nominee who is devoted to the rule of law, lived the American dream through hard work, proven his integrity, and would make history on the bench."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Human Rights Watch to Mexico: Don't Help US 'Tear Apart' Its Asylum System
The group sent a letter to the Mexican president Thursday asking him not to agree to any deal that would see more asylum seekers expelled to Mexico without having their cases considered.
Jan 19, 2024
Human Rights Watch sent a letter to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Thursday asking him not to broker any deal with the United States that would allow more asylum seekers to be sent to Mexico without due process.
The letter, also addressed to Secretary of Foreign Relations of Mexico Alicia Bárcena Ibarra, was sent one day before the pair were set to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington, D.C.
"I would like to urge the Mexican government to make a clear and public declaration that it will not agree to participate in any new migration management arrangement with the United States, whether formal or informal, that would lead to an increase in the expulsions of non-Mexican migrants and asylum seekers to Mexico, close existing legal pathways for migration, limit access to international protection, or establish a de facto 'safe third country' agreement with the United States," HRW Americas director Juanita Goebertus Estrada wrote in the letter.
The letter comes as the Biden administration is considering agreeing to immigration demands from Senate Republicans in exchange for $110 billion in funding for Ukraine, Israel, and other national security issues, as The Associated Press reported in December. Some of the policies under consideration include enabling the U.S. to expel asylum seekers to Mexico without hearing their claims; enshrining a Trump-era rule requiring that asylum seekers who pass through a third country prove that they applied for asylum there first and were denied; and essentially ending the humanitarian parole arrangement for Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans to travel in the U.S, according to HRW.
"These proposals would violate basic rights and further empower the criminal groups in Mexico that profit from kidnapping and extorting vulnerable migrants," Goebertus said in a statement.
Many of these proposals are similar to Trump-era policies that were challenged in court, but immigrant rights advocates worry that they would be harder to challenge if enshrined in law, AP reported.
"The Mexican president should make it clear he does not intend to be complicit in U.S. legislators' attempts to tear apart the U.S. asylum system."
"I never would have imagined that in a moment where we have a Democratic Senate and a Democratic White House we are coming to the table and proposing some of the most draconian immigration policies that there have ever been," Maribel Hernández Rivera, the American Civil Liberties Union director of policy and government affairs, told AP.
However, Obrador has a degree of leverage over these polices, because the U.S. cannot expel asylum seekers to Mexico without the cooperation of the Mexican government, HRW pointed out.
"President López Obrador has the opportunity to stand up for the rights of thousands of vulnerable mostly Latin American migrants and asylum seekers by refusing to make yet another deal to allow the U.S. to summarily expel people to Mexico," Goebertus said. "The Mexican president should make it clear he does not intend to be complicit in U.S. legislators' attempts to tear apart the U.S. asylum system."
In the past, Obrador has agreed to allow the U.S. to expel non-Mexican migrants back to Mexico under the "Return to Mexico" and Title 42 polices. He has also tried to prevent migrants from reaching the U.S. through Mexico. However, asylum seekers returned to Mexico have been exposed to dangers including kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder. HRW notes that U.S., Mexican, and international law all recognize the right to asylum and to not be sent back into a dangerous situation, formally known as refoulement.
In the letter, Goebertus also pointed out that ending the humanitarian parole program would mean renegotiating a deal with Mexico whereby Mexico agreed to receive 30,000 Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan asylum seekers and migrants expelled from the U.S. every month while the U.S. would allow the same number to apply to travel within its borders. In addition, a policy both expelling asylum seekers to Mexico and requiring them to apply and be rejected in Mexico first would together create what amounts to a safe third country deal between the two countries, an agreement the Obrador administration has previously opposed.
"President López Obrador should prioritize Mexicans' security and the basic rights of vulnerable migrants and make it clear Mexico will not participate in facilitating further expulsions," Goebertus said.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular