This is good news. Via RH Reality Check, we learn that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intends to name Michael Posner, the current president of Human Right First, as Assistant Secretary of State.
Posner has a 30-year history involved in human rights work, with a focus on refugees’ rights, the protection of and justice for torture victims as well as strengthening accountability for war crimes. He also helped found the Fair Labor Association, which promotes corporate accountability for working conditions in the apparel industry.
You can check out his bio here, but all in all, this dude seems too good to be true. And for that, HRC is our homegirl today.
8 Comments
these are great news!! i’m regaining hope on our new government.
It’s so nice to see the right people in government for a change. Real scientists in charge of science related issues, human rights activists in charge of human rights issues. I suddenly feel better about the country I live in.
The common sense of it all has been missing for so long, I’m almost afraid to think it’s real.
Not to put a damper on this news, because he does seem like a strong nominee, but the Fair Labor Association is considered a sham by many other labor rights organizations (including United Students Against Sweatshops and the Workers’ Rights Consortium). The FLA is essentially a way for corporations to claim that they’re monitoring labor rights without making any substantial changes. There’s very little transparency, and the workers they’re allegedly helping aren’t represented in the FLA’s leadership. The USAS website (www.studentsagainstsweatshops.org) has more information on the FLA. I don’t know much about Human Rights First, but I hope it’s a more credible organization than the FLA and not just a front for the powers that be.
This doesn’t quite make up for HRC telling China that we won’t get in the way of their human rights violations for fear of interfering with their streak of double-digit GDP growth.
Appropriately, it was Hillary’s penchant for selling out causes that she professed at other times to believe in that convinced me to vote for Obama in the first place.
Well, he cannot have been first choice for the post. By all accounts Tom Malinowski (Advocacy Director at HRW DC and former Clinton official) was the man for the job. But the new administration have got into a pickle with the whole lobbying thing and are reluctant to issue waivers to those people who lobby for the American Constitution. Of course waivers for those who did less altruistic lobbying is less of a problem…
What a sham!
She cannot say anything as secretary of state that Obama does not promote.
Learn your political structure.
Clinton is Obama’s representative and they one and the same when it comes to every policy she promotes. She is an extension of him.
I think that her response to criticisms like yours was brilliant. She and Obama both felt that
“I think that to worry about something which is so self-evident is an impediment to clear thinking,” Clinton told reporters traveling with her. “And I don’t think it should be viewed as particularly extraordinary that someone in my position would say what’s obvious.”
Anyone refusing to juxtapose our economic entanglements with China as being anything but central today misses that unless President Obama sets a firm foundation from the start with China, doing anything on human rights will be impossible.