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The Executive Session brings leaders of human rights commissions from across the United States together with Harvard faculty and other criminal justice experts. The commissions -- in some cases known as human relations or community relations commissions -- have various levels of authority to uphold civil rights and human rights standards, particularly those prohibiting discrimination and promising equal justice.
The Executive Session employs a combination of rigorous discussion, empirical research, practical innovation and professional mobilization to expand the work of these commissions. The project draws inspiration from the work of human rights commissions and ombudsmen around the globe, but the focus of the program remains domestic, filling a peculiarly American gap in the available institutional mechanisms for redressing human rights violations related to crime and justice.
Human rights violations in the criminal justice context can take many forms. Bias crimes, and failure of law enforcement to investigate them; police mistreatment of minority groups, including racial profiling or the use of excessive force; and systematic failure to recruit minorities into law enforcement agencies: all of these forms of discrimination not only harm individuals directly involved but also victimize whole groups of people, straining communities sometimes to the breaking point.
Background
Human rights commissions have been established under a variety of names in dozens of cities and almost every state. The leaders of most of these commissions participate in a common professional association, the International Association of Official Human Rights Agencies. These commissions are not well known among human rights activists inside the United States or internationally. Nevertheless, like national human rights commissions in many other countries, the commissions across the United States are involved in three broad activities: enforcement, prevention, and training.
- Enforcement activity usually includes the investigation and resolution of claims of discrimination. Enforcement powers vary, but commissions can generally hold hearings, impose fines, and issue reports, and a few can also initiate criminal prosecutions.
- Prevention activity typically includes outreach to inform people about the anti-discrimination laws and participation in public events and private discussions to reduce tensions and build trust between groups. Prevention activities may also include long-term campaigns to reduce bias and prejudice.
- Training activity aims to raise compliance with the law and increase respect for human rights within government agencies and private organizations.
Because of the legacy of slavery and racism in the United States, anti-discrimination activities dominate the agendas of America's human rights commissions. Today, many commissions focus primarily on redressing discrimination in employment, housing, financial services and access to public accommodations, giving less attention to discrimination in the response to crime and within criminal justice organizations. When commissions do turn to these issues, they tend to work on prevention and training rather than enforcement.
Yet discrimination in the work of police, the operation of the courts, and the protection of victims of crime (especially bias crimes) are precisely the issues that gave birth to some of the earliest of these state and local commissions, some even prior to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Human rights commissions are therefore a tantalizing resource with the potential to raise respect for human rights in the criminal justice sector to a new level across the country. The Executive Session on Human Rights Commissions and Criminal Justice strengthens that resource through research and experimentation.
The Executive Session Approach
A Kennedy School Executive Session convenes a group of 10 to 25 leading individuals who take joint responsibility for rethinking and revitalizing the practices of a public sector function over a period of two to three years. The best known of these was the Executive Session on Policing, which is widely credited with crystallizing the concept of community policing in the 1980s. Since then, the Kennedy School's Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management has convened sessions on the future role of local prosecutors, state and local strategies for drug control, and public defense, among others.
Members of an Executive Session are selected for their experiences in positions of responsibility for the issue at hand, their reputation for thoughtfulness, and their potential for implementing the work of the session. The session membership usually includes the leaders of both the largest and the most prominent institutions in the particular field along with smaller, innovative organizations. The membership also includes leaders of other public and private institutions whose support and advice is crucial to successful and sustainable reform. Finally, the membership typically includes members of Harvard's faculty and other scholars.
Running from January 2006 through August 2008, the Executive Session on Human Rights Commissions and Criminal Justice is structured around a core group of leaders of human rights and community relations commissions in the United States. Other members include police chiefs, and leaders of non-governmental human rights and civil rights organizations. Click here for member bios and faculty bios.
The Executive Session on Human Rights Commissions and Criminal Justice: Issues and Approach
In January 2006, at their first meeting, the initial members of the Executive Session discussed how their contrasting communities had responded to recent rights violations emanating from the criminal justice system, whether or not the commissions played a role in those responses. The members agreed that an effective response -- whether to a questionable police shooting or a series of bias crimes -- included enforcement that brings individual accountability, promotion of community healing that builds trust, and institutional reform that prevents the recurrence of these violations.
Despite the inevitable tensions among them, these three responses need to begin simultaneously. In a moment of crisis provoked by serious violations of people's rights, no single institution can lead all three of these responses, but the efforts of separate groups and institutions may be more successful if the three responses are coordinated. Employing the three-part framework, the Session is exploring the viability of an expanded role of human rights commissions, assuring that all three of these responses are in place when communities confront any one of five criminal justice issues:
- Police misconduct in dealing with racial and ethnic minorities, women, immigrants, and members of other protected groups;
- Government response to bias crimes committed against members of these same groups;
- Employment discrimination against people with criminal records;
- Persistent disparities between the demographic profile of law enforcement personnel and the communities they serve; and
- Allegations of selective state and local participation in enforcement of immigration laws.
Click here to read about specific projects the Executive Session is currently undertaking in these areas.
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