Many others will be discussed later. These NGOs are heavily funded by the Ford, Rockefeller, Charles Stewart Mott, and MacArthur Foundations. They sometimes work in tandem with leading international law and immigration law professors and often find ideologically sympathetic jurists in European (and occasionally in American) courts and administrative bodies.

A good part of the energy for transnational progressivism is provided by human rights activists who consistently evoke "evolving norms of international law" as a major tool to accomplish their goals. The main legal conflict between traditional American liberal democrats and global progressives is ultimately the question of whether the US Constitution trumps international law or international law trumps the US Constitution. By "international law" I am referring to what experts, including John Bolton, Jeremy Rabkin, Jack Goldsmith, Lee Casey, and David Rivkin have called the "new international law" that differs from traditional concepts of the "Law of Nations."

Before the mid-20th century traditional international law usually referred to relations among nation-states, it was "international" in the real sense of the term. Since that time the "new international law" increasingly penetrates the sovereignty of democratic nation-states, it is, therefore, in reality, "transnational law." Human rights activists work to establish norms for this "new international (i.e. transnational) law," and then attempt to bring the United States into conformity with a legal regime whose reach often extends beyond democratic politics and the guarantees of the US Constitution.

The tactics of the transnational progressives (including American and non-American NGOs and UN officials) are to excoriate American political, legal and administrative practices in virulent language, as if the American liberal democratic nation-state was an illegitimate authoritarian regime. Thus, Amnesty International USA in a 1998 report charged the US with "a persistent and widespread pattern of human rights violations." Amnesty stated that, "racism and discrimination contribute to the denial of the fundamental rights of countless men, women, and children" in the United States. Moreover, police brutality is "entrenched and nation-wide"; the US is the "world leader in high tech repression"; and it is time for the US to face up to its "hypocrisy." The report discussed "a national background of economic and racial injustice, a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiments" and stated that, "human rights violations in the US occur in rural communities and urban communities from coast to coast." The United States had long "abdicated its duty" to lead the world in promoting human rights. Therefore, declared William Schultz, the executive director of Amnesty International USA, "it was no wonder the United States was ousted from the Human Rights Commission" (of the UN.)

While Amnesty called on the UN to condemn "institutionalized cruelty" in the US, Human Rights Watch issued a 450-page report excoriating all types of "human rights violations." For example, Human Rights Watch declared that "criminal justice polices" display a "disproportionate impact on African-Americans" ("Although, they comprised about 12 percent of the national adult population, they comprised 49.9 percent of the prison population.") Overall, Human Rights Watch declared, the US was guilty of "serious human rights violations" including:

. "rampant" police brutality, and

. "harassment of gay adults in the military paralleled by the harassment of students perceived to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered" in public schools that are "experienced" by these students "as a place that accepted intolerance, hatred, ostracization, and violence against youth who were perceived as different."

Human Rights Watch also attacked the "curtailment of internationally-recognized rights" for [illegal] immigrants and complained that "the U.S. Border Patrol continued to grow at an alarming pace, doubling since 1993, when there were roughly 4,000 agents, to.approximately 8,000 agents."

UN special investigators (rapporteurs) examined US "human rights violations" in 1990s. The first thing these investigators did was meet with an array of American NGOs. In their official reports, the UN officials quoted freely from American NGO documents. UN investigator, Maurice Glele of Benin, wrote that, "racism existed in the US with sociological inertia, structural obstacles, and individual resistance.." Glele visited the US State Department and found that discrimination complaints by African American State Department employees "had dragged on since 1986." Meanwhile, the report stated, the "State Department remains a very white institution." The UN investigator further wrote, "The fate of the majority of Blacks is one of poverty, sickness, illiteracy, drugs, and crime in response to the social cul-de-sac in which they find themselves."

Rahhika Coomaraswamy of Sri Lanka, the UN Special Rapporteur (SR) on Violence Against Women found that the United States is "criminalizing" a large segment of its population, a group that is "composed of poor persons of color and increasingly female." She complained that the US holds more prisoners than any other country in world and that more than "43,000 are women, most of them poor and black."

Bacre Waly Ndiaye, UN SR on Extrajudical, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions , like other UN investigators met with representatives of American NGOs including ACLU, American Friends Service Committee, Amnesty International, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Human Rights Watch, and the International Human Rights Law Group among others. The SR's report found "a significant degree of unfairness and arbitrariness" in the application of the death penalty." The report complained that 41% of death penalty inmates are African-American, 47% white, 7% Hispanic, 1.5% American Indian. The UN Special Rapporteur also specifically attacked the US justice system in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Durban as a Case Study of NGO Activity

The recent UN Conference Against Racism and Xenophobia held in Durban, South Africa, represents a classic case study of how American NGOs promote transnational progressivism. About a year before the conference was to meet, a group of about fifty American NGOs (including the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, the NAACP, the International Human Rights Law Group,) sent a formal letter to UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson that called upon the UN "to hold the United States accountable for the intractable and persistent problem of discrimination" that "men and women of color face at the hands of the US criminal justice system."

The spokesman for the group, Wade Henderson, of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, stated that its demands "had been repeatedly raised with federal and state officials but to little effect." "In frustration," he said, "we now turn to the United Nations." In other words, the NGOs said, in effect, that they could not enact the policies that they favored through the normal processes of American constitutional democracy-through state governments, state courts, the Congress, the Executive Branch, or even the federal courts. Therefore, they found themselves compelled to appeal to authority outside of American democracy and beyond its Constitution.

The NGOs attended Durban with strong financial backing from the Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur, and Charles Stewart Mott Foundations. Once at the conference the NGOs worked in tandem with the African states that were supporting "reparations" from Western nations as compensation for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade of the 17th to 19th centuries. The NGOs provided research assistance and helped developed resolutions calling for the US and other Western nations to pay reparations for historic Atlantic slavery. Although they failed to mention the large traffic (14 million as opposed to 11 million) of African slaves that were sent to the Islamic lands of the Middle East). At Durban, the NGOs endorsed a series of demands including those that:

. support the "inclusion of compensatory measures" (i.e. reparations for slavery) as a sub-theme on the agenda of the World Conference.

. require that the US "publicly acknowledge the breath and pervasiveness of institutional racism" which "permeates every institution at every level."

. call for a declaration that "racial bias corrupts every stage of the [US] criminal justice process, from suspicion to investigation, arrest, prosecution, trial, and sentencing."

. insist that "rhetoric emphasizing the 'progress' we have made in overcoming this country's racial problems actually ignores how deeply imbedded racism is."

. urge that hate crimes legislation be supported and expanded at federal and state levels.

. condemn opposition to affirmative action and "urged the US government and state authorities reaffirm and vigorously defend.affirmative action measures."

. excoriate the "persistent failure of the US government to recognize that an adequate standard of living is a right, not privilege" and deplored the "denial of economic rights in this country (USA)."

. characterize policies that emphasize English language acquisition for non-English speakers as "discriminatory" and insisted that "multi-lingualism should be encouraged and promoted, not impeded."

. denounce free market capitalism as "a fundamentally flawed system" and [express] "the conviction that it is possible to organize a more just, equitable and socially responsible system."

Most importantly, the NGOs insist that the US ratify all major UN "human rights" treaties and drop legal "reservations" to treaties already ratified. Thus in 1994 the United States ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), but attached reservations declaring that the US did not accept treaty requirements "incompatible with the Constitution." The US refused to accept these treaty requirements because the CERD treaty contains provisions that restrict certain types of speech and political activity allowed by the First Amendment. Yet leading NGOs, including the Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA, and the International Human Rights Group, demand that the US drop "all reservations" to the CERD treaty.

On August 6, 2001, Reuters reported the US presented its first explanation to a UN committee on how it was implementing the CERD treaty. According to Reuters, an American delegation "reiterated the US policy of condemning unequal treatment of racial and ethnic minorities." However, neither the UN Committee nor the NGOs were interested in equal treatment; instead, they insisted on equal results. So much is apparent when an NGO representative from the Center for Constitutional Rights complained that, "Almost every member of the UN committee raised the question of why there are vast racial disparities.in every aspect of American life-education, housing, health, welfare, criminal justice." A representative from Human Rights Watch declared the US offered "no remedies," saying that the US "simply restated a position which already doesn't comply with the CERD and which indicates no willingness to comply."

Indeed, to comply with the NGO interpretation of the CERD treaty, the US would have to turn its political and economic system, together with their underlying principles, upside down-abandoning the free speech guarantees of the Constitution, bypassing federalism, and ignoring the very concept of majority rule-since practically nothing in the NGO agenda is supported by the American people. Nevertheless, the NGOs insist upon "compliance." Not surprisingly, the Ford Foundation awarded a $300,000 grant to the International Human Rights Law Group "to encourage US compliance with CERD." It is revealing that the language of almost all the UN conventions that ignore the guarantees of the US Constitution including the International Criminal Courts (ICC), the Convention on Women's Rights, the Convention on Children's Rights were written by American and other Western NGOs. In other words, the documents were written by a Western post-national intelligentsia aided by a "Westernistic" or "Westernized" coterie of Third World intellectuals (e.g.Nobel Laureate Kofi Annan.)

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