A Look at US Government Support for the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement

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

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United Nations’ Committee Calls on U.S. Government to Protect Human Rights in Gulf Coast Recovery

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. 

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Oil Spill Puts People of Color on Slippery Slope

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

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Reports

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

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AEHR Media Coverage

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

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Living on Earth, National Public Radio: Environmental Human Rights

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

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No Joy in Mossville, Gambit Weekly

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

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Group protests Landrieu’s recovery bill, Baton Rouge Advocate

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

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Human rights group calls for Katrina investigation, The Times-Picayune

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

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