History

The Network is an outcome of the US Human Rights Leadership Summit "Ending Exceptionalism: Strengthening Human Rights in the United States," July 12-14, 2002 at Howard University Law School.

The summit brought together more than 50 leading activists from a variety of different disciplines and issue areas to assess human rights work in the United States and identify ways to strengthen the human rights agenda.

Specifically, the summit was an effort to foster dialogue and strategic thinking across issues as well as sectors of work. Summit participants represented six issue areas (poverty, discrimination, immigration, incarceration, death penalty, and sovereignty), and six sectors of work (education, documentation, organizing, legal, policy, and scholarship). They met in working groups and caucuses arranged accordingly and in several plenary sessions.

The Leadership Summit generated tremendous energy and excitement. It was the first time that many of these visionary activists had come together to discuss an emerging US human rights movement.

Summit participants decided that a human rights network would be the most useful way to enable a broad array of organizations and individuals to work collaboratively to strengthen human rights work in the United States. The US Human Rights Network was established the following spring and was guided by a bifurcated governance structure consisting of a Secretariat and Coordinating Committee until June 2004.

Founding Members:

  • ACLU
  • American Friends Service Committee
  • Amnesty International USA
  • Arnold Mireles Human Rights Project
  • Audre Lord Project
  • Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law
  • CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities
  • Center for Constitutional Rights
  • Center for Economic and Social Rights
  • Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles
  • Columbia University Law School
  • Columbia University School of Public Health
  • Community Legal Services
  • Deaf and Deaf-Blind Committee on Human Rights
  • Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
  • Ho-Chunk Nation Court System
  • Human Rights Watch
  • Incite! Women of Color Against Violence
  • Indian Law Resource Center
  • Jobs with Justice
  • Kemba N Smith Youth Foundation
  • Kensington Welfare Rights Union
  • Mental Disabilities Rights International
  • Mississippi Workers' Center for Human Rights
  • NAACP Legal Defense Education Fund
  • National Center for Human Rights Education
  • National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
  • National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
  • Sentencing Project
  • SisterLove, Inc
  • SW Alliance to Resist Militarization
  • Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
  • United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 1529
  • Urban Justice Center
  • Western Shoshone Defense Project
  • WILD for Human Rights
  • Women's Economic Agenda Project
  • Women's Rights Network