Barriers to Women\u27s Access to Justice in Haiti

While gender-based violence is not a new phenomenon in Haiti, the aftermath of the January 12, 2010 earthquake further exposed the vulnerability of Haitian women and girls to gender-based violence and the limited possibilities for women to evince a judicial response to gender-specific violations of the law. Drawing from the experiences of Haitian lawyers and women’s rights advocates, this paper will examine women’s barriers to accessing justice in Haiti by drawing on actual examples of gender-based violence at each step of the investigatory process under the Haitian justice system. It will provide, by way of background, an overview of the Haitian justice system, including gender rights under Haitian law, the framework of Haiti’s obligations with respect to the administration of justice, and the structure and processes of each institution implicated in the pursuit of justice for cases involving gender-based violence. Additionally, the case studies will reveal the requirements and barriers women confront at each stage of the process. The article will then explore community-based responses to addressing these barriers and provide recommendations on legislative, judicial, and law enforcement reforms aimed at improving women’s access to justice

Ferguson to Geneva: Using the Human Rights Framework to Push Forward a Vision for Racial Justice in the United States after Ferguson

As demonstrations under the banner of #BlackLivesMatter continue to erupt around the United States against state-sponsored violence, and as state, local, and federal officials continue to eschew fundamental social change, families and protesters have begun to explore alternative international forums in the search for justice. The Ferguson to Geneva delegation represents a significant event in this internationalist turn. The delegation, consisting of the parents of Mike Brown, Jr. and young Black leaders from Ferguson, chose to air their grievances before the United Nations Committee Against Torture in the fall of 2014. This article reproduces the delegation\u27s shadow report, which laid the groundwork for its testimony, and further describes delegation members\u27 subsequent efforts to leverage the outcome of the United Nations Committee review process to bolster domestic advocacy. It concludes finally that international human rights law and its formal accountability mechanisms should not encompass the totality of what people perceive as the potential and depth of the human rights discourse; instead, these should be considered nothing more than tools that can be strategically employed to support a broader process of organizing and grassroots resistance

Case Study 1: Movement Groups with Flat, Innovative Governance Structures

Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, the global justice/anti-globalization movement, the radical environmental movement of the 1990s, and other organizations have moved away from traditional hierarchical models of leadership within their movements in favor of more horizontal, “leader-full” structures or network models. More horizontal or network models have been used even when a group of people is engaged in what might ordinarily be considered “service” work, like disaster recovery and feeding the hungry. Relatedly, organizers of mass mobilizations may engage the support of lawyers even before these actions crystallize into a movement or formally structured organization—as informal governance structures exist in the planning and execution of these mobilizations. One example is the Ferguson Legal Defense Network, which formed under the direction of trusted lawyer contacts amidst the mass mobilizations in Ferguson in the aftermath of the police killing of Michael Brown Jr. This short contribution examines some of these non-traditional, social movement-based lawyer-client relationships, evaluates the accompanying professional responsibility challenges, and offers preliminary approaches. These challenges—though not insurmountable—require thought and a foundational understanding of the goals and methods of social movement organizations

A Few Interventions and Offerings from Five Movement Lawyers to the Access to Justice Movement

We are five lawyers who occupy very different corners of justice work. We are civil rights, human rights, and criminal defense lawyers, and we have worked at and managed legal services programs. We have taught law at law schools and universities and have built our own organizations. We currently work in interdisciplinary spaces with community organizers, funders, and other stakeholders in the justice system. As diverse as our perspectives are, we share a common belief that any mobilization around access to justice fails if it does not center the vision and strategies of larger social justice movements. We share here our collective calls to action to the legal community—and the allies that support and resource legal services—to expand our mission beyond chasing a standard of fairness that is impossible to achieve as long as we have deeply embedded structural and systemic inequity. Instead, let us reimagine what our communities actually need to be safe, free, and to live in our fullest humanity. We believe the role of movement lawyers is to use the law as a tool of social change, at the direction of communities most impacted by injustice. When we focus our lawyering on listening to community organizers, clients, and activists with a broader vision for social change, we can become partners in transforming systems, rather than simply making them more hospitable

A Right-Based Approach to Lawyering: Legal Empowerment as an Alternative to Legal Aid in Post-Disaster Haiti

This article is authored by three attorneys from the Institute for Justice & Democracy and its sister organization, the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), based in Port-au-Prince Haiti, who suggest a new, more sustainable model of lawyering for poor and marginalized populations. The BAI has developed and implemented a legal empowerment approach to human rights lawyering for Haiti\u27s Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), in particular women and the displaced

HnRNPK maintains single strand RNA through controlling double-strand RNA in mammalian cells

Although antisense transcription is a widespread event in the mammalian genome, double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) formation between sense and antisense transcripts is very rare and mechanisms that control dsRNA remain unknown. By characterizing the FGF-2 regulated transcriptome in normal and cancer cells, we identified sense and antisense transcripts IER3 and IER3-AS1 that play a critical role in FGF-2 controlled oncogenic pathways. We show that IER3 and IER3-AS1 regulate each other\u27s transcription through HnRNPK-mediated post-transcriptional regulation. HnRNPK controls the mRNA stability and colocalization of IER3 and IER3-AS1. HnRNPK interaction with IER3 and IER3-AS1 determines their oncogenic functions by maintaining them in a single-stranded form. hnRNPK depletion neutralizes their oncogenic functions through promoting dsRNA formation and cytoplasmic accumulation. Intriguingly, hnRNPK loss-of-function and gain-of-function experiments reveal its role in maintaining global single- and double-stranded RNA. Thus, our data unveil the critical role of HnRNPK in maintaining single-stranded RNAs and their physiological functions by blocking RNA-RNA interactions

Stand Your Ground Laws: International Human Rights Law Implications

Since the February 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin and other recent high-profile criminal cases, “Stand Your Ground” (“SYG”) laws in the United States have come under intense scrutiny. Florida is ground zero for the controversy. SYG laws expand the “Castle Doctrine” — a common law doctrine by which deadly force may be used in self-defense or to prevent a forcible felony when one is in the safety of one’s home — to include public places outside the home. Thus, SYG laws remove the classic common law duty to retreat in public spaces, while extending immunity from prosecution or civil suit for the use of deadly force in self-defense beyond the home. Florida’s SYG law is especially broad in this respect