Breakthrough’s Ring the Bell — stopping violence against women
“I became an expert. I knew exactly when to open a door and insert myself between my father’s fist and my mother’s body.” Sir Patrick Stewart spoke these words to a packed, pin-drop-silent house at the March 8 New York City launch of our global Ring the Bell: One million men. One million promises campaign. When he concluded, the crowd leapt to its feet.
YOU can watch the moment it happened — along with the amazing male leaders who echoed Sir Patrick in saying: “Violence against women is the single greatest human rights violation of our generation. This is a call to action.”
Watch Michael Bolton, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, and the other luminaries who have begun to inspire one million men to make one million promises to take concrete action to end violence against women. As the world watched and connected, these men offered a vision of a future that I believe is now closer than ever, a future where women and girls — and families, neighborhoods, and nations — are safe and thriving.
We can build that future together. Make your promise today!
Stopping indefinite detentions
The families of Fred Korematsu, Minoru Yasui, and Gordon Hirabayashi this week filed an amicus brief with the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Hedges v. Obama, a lawsuit that challenges the constitutionality of a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA).
The amicus brief describes a terrifying parallel to the incarceration of Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II. Under the pretense of national security, the NDAA essentially repeats the decisions in the discredited World War II cases of Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and Yasui, allowing the government to imprison people without any due process rights for an indefinite time. Download a PDF of the amicus brief at http://repeatinghistory.org
The 2012 NDAA authorizes the U.S. military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone, including American citizens on U.S. soil, without a warrant or due process if the military simply suspects them of supporting terrorism. This is exactly what the U.S government did in 1942 to 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, and who spent years in prisons without notice of charges, the right to an attorney, or the right to a trial.
These potential infringements on the constitutional rights of citizens and residents doom us to repeat history and subverts what should have been lessons learned from the wartime imprisonment.
If you want to help — check out this campaign http://repeatinghistory.org/takeaction/
Rights Working Group Anti-Racial Profiling Campaign
The Racial Profiling: Face the Truth campaign seeks to win reforms in local, state and federal policies to end the practice of racial profiling by law enforcement. Racial profiling is humiliating and degrading for those targeted by law enforcement, it is an ineffective law enforcement practice, and it is often the entry point into a broad range of other human rights violations. RWG sees the fight against racial profiling as a part of a broader struggle to achieve racial justice and human rights for everyone in the United States.[See the video, Face the Truth: Racial Profiling Across America]The goal of the Face the Truthcampaign is to achieve commitments at all levels of government to ban all forms of racial and religious profiling by law enforcement.