From the Editors

In early 2005, eleven U.S. Army reservists were court-martialed for abuses committed against prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison in Iraq. The world saw photographs of naked men, men being attacked by dogs, an army reservist giving a "thumbs up" over the corpse of an Iraqi, and the famous pictures of Lindy England, also performing for the camera, holding one end of a leash with a naked man on the other end.

The American public and the world hoped that the verdicts of 2005 and the promise of President Barack Obama to close the detention camps at Guantanamo Bay signaled the closing of a chapter. But new information demonstrates that we cannot necessarily expect closure. In the March 2010 issue of Harper's Magazine article, Scott Horton's article, "The Guantanamo 'Suicides': A Camp Delta Sergeant Blows the Whistle," provides a timeline for the death of three Guantanamo prisoners in June 2006, deaths that were officially labeled suicides by hanging. The evidence--or lack of, as the neck organs of the three dead men turned up missing--strongly suggests otherwise. Like the fires in abandoned mines all over the world, torture seems impossible to extinguish.

While the good news about America's record on human rights is that various abuses are coming to light, the bad news is that mistreatment continues and prosecution and punishment seem aimed at a few practitioners without implicating those in command. And while these human rights abuses involving the military are cut and dried, other issues of human rights are not so clear. The protections and rights that people around the world are entitled to have long been subjects of debate. Fortunately, there is some agreement about what constitutes a human right, as spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948. We have chosen it as our classic piece for this issue, for consideration while reading the articles that follow.

In The Infrastructure of Migration and the Migration Regime: Human Rights, Race, and the Somali Struggle to Flee Violence, Doug Rutledge and Abdi Roble of The Somali Documentary Project follow one Somali woman, Naimo Abdalle, as she flees civil war in her country and struggles to find freedom and safety. Life in the refugee camps is unhealthy and the road to safety for Abdalle and hundreds of thousands of Somali refuges like her is dangerous. Treaties and laws enacted to help the survivors of World War II are inadequate to the task of helping modern refugees from African countries.

We interviewed Roy Brown, Camilla Croso, and Marco Perolini about their participation in the Durban Review Conference, which took place in April 2009 in Geneva, Switzerland as a follow up to the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance that was held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. The United States did not attend the 2009 event. We were especially interested to learn from these three activists about significant human rights and/or racial justice issues in the world that are unknown or underappreciated. Their viewpoints appear in Perspectives on Durban II.

Monica M. White's article, Shouldering Responsibility for the Delivery of Human Rights: A Case Study of the D-Town Farmers of Detroit, considers community activism in the service of nutrition. Without a grocery store or a supermarket within its city limits, Detroit has become a "food desert," a place where both economic and physical barriers stand between people and their access to healthy and affordable food. The members of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network grow food, provide nutrition education, and have formed a food-buying cooperative. The experience of the D-Town farmers suggests that they cannot count on others to provide them with healthy foods because availability to such items is based on race and class privilege.

In Communicating on Social Justice Issues within a Human Rights Framework: Messaging Recommendations for Advocates, Eleni Delimpaltadaki and Julie Rowe of The Opportunity Agenda discuss the results of their organization's research, the goal of which was to understand how Americans think and talk about human rights...