[MUSIC]
[MIGUEL ANDRADE:] This weekend is actually a really exciting event happening here in
Philadelphia where local organizations such as Juntos, 1Love, and the
Philadelphia Student Union have been partnering with the US Human Rights Network
to sort of shed a spotlight on some of the human rights issues that are
happening in the northeast region part of the country.
[ERIKA ALMIRON:] When we’re talking about immigration, detention, deportation, incarceration,
we’re talking about a large system that has been built out to exclude a whole community
from having any power in this country.
[MIA-LIA BOUA KIERNAN:] The #Right2Return Campaign has three locations of work: the
United States, Cambodia, and the United Nations.
‘Cause what we see in the strategy of the #Right2Return Campaign is this foreign policy
agreement between the U.S. and Cambodia, and so in order to have accountability for the
U.S. government and the Cambodian government, we need to go to the United Nations, right?
There has to be, like, another party that is involved in our strategy.
Working with the US Human Rights Network and our local partners here to bring United Nations
rapporteurs to Philly was part of moving the United Nations piece of our strategy forward.
The last thing that we want to share with you is the documents we gave you all at the
panel which is laying out really what we feel is the human rights violations that our community
has experienced over the last 40 years by the U.S. government.
As you can see it begins with Article 3, the human right to life, liberty, and security
that was violated against our community by the Secret Bombing campaign of Cambodia by
the U.S. Article 25, our human right to food, shelter, and health, beginning with all the
political upheavals in our home countries coming to the United States that are being resettled in
communities where no one has had the ability to live their full human dignity.
Our human right to education, human right to equality before the law in terms of the
education systems in this country and the criminal justice system.
And lastly, the human right to due process, human right to unity, and the human
right to fair arrest, detention, and exile, all of this buried in the immigration laws
of this country and the repatriation agreement signed secretly by the United States government
and other nations.
And finally, our human right to democracy being that we had no say in what that repatriation
agreement looked like as a community when it impacted us completely and wholly as human
beings and so we really are coming to you all on this panel to take a look at what it means
for the U.S. government to secretly sign repatriation agreements with nations across the world without
any accountability or transparency, what that means for communities everywhere.
[applause]
[HELEN GYM:] Most laws that hold people accountable retroactive to the law are
usually illegal on the face of them.
They’re desperately unfair, people don’t understand the consequences, people
plea bargain when they may not have plea bargained had they known that the
consequence could have been deportation.
[RORNG SONG:] Because we’re poor, we're refugees, and we don’t have access to
legal representation and do not know about the criminal justice system.
[EJIM DIKE:] Families being denied visitation rights after they’ve been deported, I think
is a clear human rights violation.
People being deported not having access to legal counsel by law, that’s a clear human
rights violation.
[NINA AHMAD:] What do we as a country stand for?
And how do we have the right to tell other countries to change their ways when we are
not looking inwards?
The beauty of this country is if you can manage to engage enough people around an issue that’s
fundamentally unfair, I think we respond.
It’s a matter of creating that economy of scale where people are mobilized enough to
deal with it.
[MIA-LIA BOUA KIERNAN:] What we’re going to do at this point now is file that urgent
appeal to the United Nations when we’re in Cambodia.
An urgent appeal is something that civil society, which is community, lodges to specific United
Nations rapporteurs.
It details out all the human rights violations that communities feel have been held
against them.
[NAROEN CHHIN:] So we’re going back to Cambodia this November as part of…we’re bringing
our allies and partners to Cambodia to 1) to uplift our #Right2Return Campaign.
We also want to support the capacity of 1Love Cambodia so that way we can connect all the
deportation issues across different color lines.