SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR ON RACISM, RACIAL DISCRIMINATION, XENOPHOBIA AND RELATED INTOLERANCE TO VISIT THE UNITED STATES

16 May 2008

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, Doudou Diène, will undertake a country visit to the United States from 19 May to 6 June 2008 at the invitation of the Government of the United States.

The Special Rapporteur will visit the cities of Washington, New York, Chicago, Omaha, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico to gather first-hand information on issues related to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. He is scheduled to hold meetings with representatives of the Government, both at national and local levels, and with members of the legislative and judiciary branches. Discussions will also be held with non-governmental organizations, community members, representatives of political parties, academics and other organizations and individuals working in the field of racism and discrimination.

The Special Rapporteur will submit a final report on the visit for consideration at a forthcoming session of the Human Rights Council in 2009.

The mandate of the Special Rapporteur on racism was established in 1993 by the Commission on Human Rights to examine incidents of contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, as well as governmental measures to overcome them. It was further extended by the Human Rights Council in its resolutions 5/1 and 7/34. A former director of UNESCO Department of Intercultural Dialogue, Mr. Diène is the second Special Rapporteur to hold the mandate. Since his appointment in 2002, he has conducted official visits to Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Canada, Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Côte d’Ivoire, Guatemala, Japan, Brazil, Switzerland, Italy, the Russian Federation, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the Dominican Republic and Mauritania.

For more information please go to http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/racism/rapporteur/index.htm
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Supreme Court Won’t Hear Apartheid Lawsuit

By DAVID STOUT
Published: May 13, 2008
nytimes

WASHINGTON: Indeed, the wheels of justice sometimes grind slowly. And sometimes they move in reverse, or lurch forward almost on their own.

So it was at the Supreme Court on Monday, when the court announced  that, because of some 21st-century conflicts of interest, it was unable to consider a lawsuit based on an 18th-century law and involving the bygone 20th-century apartheid era in South Africa.

The high court’s inability to take up the case means that the long-running lawsuit will go on, much to the displeasure of several dozen  corporations, because a decision handed down in October by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, will stand as the last word on the issue.

The Second Circuit reinstated the human rights suit against a list of American, Canadian and European corporations “on behalf of all persons who lived in South Africa between 1948 and the present and who suffered damages as a result of apartheid.” The Second Circuit overruled a 2004 federal district court ruling dismissing the suit for lack of jurisdiction.

The suit is based on the Alien Tort Claims Act, a law enacted in 1789 that was meant to protect American ships from pirates and American diplomats from attack overseas. In throwing out the suit in 2004, Judge John E. Sprizzo wrote that courts must be “extremely cautious in permitting suits here based upon a corporation’ s doing business in  countries with less than stellar human rights records,” and that such suits could have “significant, if not disastrous, effects” on trade.

The corporate defendants, among them Citigroup, General Electric, I.B.M., General Motors and ExxonMobil, had hoped to persuade the Supreme Court to adopt Judge Sprizzo’s view and declare that the Second Circuit appeals court was wrong. The Bush administration and the current South African government sided with the corporations.

But the Supreme Court issued a brief order on Monday saying that it could not intervene in the case. The reason was eye-catching: Four of the court’s nine members had to sideline themselves because of conflicts.

It is not uncommon for, say, a single member of the high court to sit out a case because of an apparent or potential conflict, leaving the other eight to decide it. But Monday’s mass recusal, which left the high court unable to muster a quorum of six justices,was the first in memory to be based on conflicts of interest.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Samuel A. Alito Jr. could not take part because they own stock in some of the companies involved. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy does not, but his son Gregory is a managing director at Credit Suisse, one of the defendants, so he recused himself as well.

The Supreme Court’s inability to take up the case, known as American Isuzu Motors v. Ntsebeza, allows it to go forward, although there is always the possibility that the corporations could gain a dismissal of the case at the trial level. The Supreme Court development could also renew debate over judges and their investments in a truly global economy.

“There is a problem with judges getting into situations where they have to recuse themselves,” Ronald Rotunda, an expert on judicial
ethics at George Mason University’s law school in Fairfax, Va., said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “I think the answer is, they
ought to sell the stock and buy mutual funds.”

The corporations’ lead lawyer, Francis Barron, said, “We are disappointed that recusals made the court unable to hear the case and
correct the Second Circuit majority’s clear legal errors,” Bloomberg reported.

If Monday’s development was dismaying to the big corporations, it brought elation to the three groups of plaintiffs, who are suing over
the way they were treated between 1948 and the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994.

“We are delighted,” Shirley Gunn, a board member of the Khulumani Support Group, which represents some 36,000 claimants, told
Reuters. “It’s a victory, and we are very, very happy.”