Oxford Global Justice Internship Oliver Persey 2015

American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program, September-December 2015.

I was fortunate enough to spend nearly four months with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program, generously funded by Oxford University Law Faculty’s Global Justice Internship Programme.

The American Civil Liberties Union is the preeminent civil rights organization in America. Most of its work focuses on domestic civil rights advocacy and litigation- voting rights, immigrants’ rights, criminal justice reform, reproductive rights etc.. The ACLU has been involved with every major US civil rights case in living memory, from Obergefell v. Hodges (last year’s landmark equal marriage judgment), to Brown v. Board of Education (which ended racially segregated schools), to Roe v. Wade (which upheld a woman’s right to have an abortion).

A decade ago the ACLU set up its ‘Human Rights Program’ (HRP), a small but dynamic department that works both independently and with other ACLU departments to hold the US government to account for violations of international human rights law.  No easy task. Louis Henkin famously commented that the US has a ‘flying buttress’ mentality to human rights, promoting human rights internationally but not engaging with them domestically.

At the HRP I worked on an advocacy project on police use of force against people with mental illnesses. The project looks at international human rights law standards on police use of force, and how the US could and should change its policing strategy to uphold those standards during interactions with mentally ill people. I researched the relevant IHRL standards, selected police departments to request records from under State freedom of information laws, identified key actors to speak to, and reached out to policing experts around the world to see how things are done differently elsewhere.

Working on the project inspired me to look more closely at police use of force against mentally ill people in the UK. I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Home Office for the statistics on police use of Tasers against mentally ill people in England & Wales. The results were quite alarming- 2/3rds of people Tasered by the police are identified as mentally ill. The story was picked up by The Independent and the findings prompted a debate on police Tasering policy in the UK.

I was also very lucky to be part of the HRP’s team that went to the Human Rights Council in Geneva during the US government’s response to its Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in September. I sat in on meetings between civil society and Mark Harper, the US Ambassador to the Human Rights Council, and met delegates from a wide range of human rights organizations, from Human Rights Watch to the Kingdom of Hawaii.

My experience at the Human Rights Program was a very positive one. I worked with and learnt from some of the best civil rights lawyers in the US, and I plan to continue working on issues involving police and mental health in the UK. I am grateful for being given this opportunity and I recommend everyone eligible and interested in gaining experience working on global justice issues to apply for the fundin