The US government has co-sponsored United Nations’ resolutions that adopted the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement as an important tool for dealing with situations of internal displacement and welcomed the fact that an increasing number of countries, United Nations agencies, and regional and non-governmental organizations are applying them as a standard. In October 2004, the U.S. State
The hundreds of lives lost as a result of substandard and ineptly designed levees and the discriminatory treatment of African American hurricane survivors during and after Hurricane Katrina are widely known, but have not been fully recognized as human rights violations. The U.S. government is obligated to protect the human rights to life and non-discrimination.
For twelve days, approximately 2,520,000 gallons of oil have gushed from the depths of the Gulf of Mexico as a result of the explosion and fire that capsized an oil rig under contract to the British Petroleum Oil Corporation (BP). No effective safety preparations were in place to prevent the massive oil slick now heading
“It’s not FEMA. It’s not the state. It’s not the city. It’s the Stafford Act. The system sucks.” — Mark Smith, Louisiana Homeland Security Office, quoted in State Offers to Turn Over FEMA Aid, The Times-Picayune, 1/27/07, p. A-1. The controlling federal law on national disasters and emergenices, the Robert T. Stafford Act, does not require
Industrial Sources of Dioxin Poisoning in Mossville, Louisiana: (July, 2007) A Report Based on the Government’s Own Data DOWNLOAD the full report Full resolution (Press .PDF) Optimized resolution (web .PDF) Executive Summary Since 1998, the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) – which is a division of the Centers for Disease Control
Monday, January 21, 2008 Katrina response still not meeting U.N. human rights standards, LA Weekly Hurricane Katrina was not only a domestic tragedy. The U.S. government’s insufficient efforts to prevent families from being uprooted, its inadequate emergency response, and the still-lagging recovery are at odds with internationally recognized human rights principles that the Bush administration
link to original audio recording, transcript below CURWOOD: From the Jennifer and Ted Stanley Studios in Somerville, Massachusetts, this is Living on Earth. I’m Steve Curwood. [OUTDOOR CROWD SOUND] CURWOOD: A group of citizens from the small Louisiana bayou town of Mossville recently visited the nation’s capital—most of them for the first time. They did
link to original article By Eliza Strickland Sixty-nine years ago, Edgar Mouton Jr. was born into a small town in southwest Louisiana where the houses alternated with rice and potato fields and where patches of forest lined the dirt roads. The townspeople were poor, he says, but the bounty from the Bayou d’Inde turned many
By Gerard Shields WASHINGTON – A group of residents representing Louisiana environmental groups took over a conference room in the office of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., on Tuesday, refusing to leave until they met with her over hurricane recovery legislation that they said would be detrimental to the environment. Attorneys for Advocates for Environmental
By Bruce Alpert WASHINGTON — An international human rights agency is being asked to investigate whether the U.S. government is doing enough to help Hurricane Katrina victims and whether workers doing post-hurricane cleanup and rebuilding jobs are being protected from exploitation by contractors. “Six months have passed, and these communities still look like the hurricane
