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A letter signed by a coalition of thirteen U.S.-based international human rights and domestic civil rights groups, requesting that your administration compile and publish an annual report on the state of human rights in the United States.

Sincerely,

Kenneth Roth
Executive Director

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January 29, 1998

President William J. Clinton
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear President Clinton:

As the international community observes the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and we recall the leading role of the United States in helping to draft this important document, we note that the United States remains disappointingly reluctant to assess its own conduct under international human rights standards. As a coalition of U.S.-based international human rights and domestic civil rights groups, we are writing to request that your administration compile and publish an annual report on the state of human rights in the United States to demonstrate the government's commitment in practice to international human rights norms. Such a report would enable the American public to gauge compliance with international human rights treaties ratified by the United States. To date, no such report exists.

As you know, the State Department's Bureau on Democracy, Human Rights and Labor will issue its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices this week. Those reports have improved over the past several years, and their high quality points up the absence of a similar report dedicated to human rights practices in the United States.

In making this request, we do not seek a report that merely cites legal protections in these areas, as was provided in the July 1994 report on compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Instead, like the State Department's country reports on human rights, we seek an honest appraisal of how, in practice, rights are protected.

We believe that such a report would assist policymakers in identifying trends in violations, provide the public with information about efforts to hold abusers accountable, and submit our government to the same scrutiny that the U.S. applies to other governments in its annual country reports on human rights. We urge you to instruct the relevant departments to compile and publish this report annually, beginning next year.

We look forward to a chance to discuss this proposal in more detail, at your convenience.

Sincerely,

American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
American Civil Liberties Union
Amnesty International USA
Human Rights Watch
International Human Rights Law Group

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
National Organization for Women
Physicians for Human Rights
RFK Memorial Center for Human Rights
Southern Center for Human Rights
Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children

cc: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

Attorney General Janet Reno

Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck

Acting Assistant Attorney General Bill Lann Lee

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