During the Human Rights Council in Geneva earlier this week, Special Rapporteur Ben Saul held an event on the abuse of “counterterrorism” laws and narratives, focusing on the human rights violations committed in the name of combating drugs and organized crime. This trend has risen to new extremes with the Trump Administration’s lethal attacks on civilian boats and its invasion of Venezuela. Samer Araabi, our Associate Director of Political Education and Research, participated in the event and offered the following remarks:
We welcome the Special Rapporteur calling attention to the profound human rights implications of nebulous “counter-terrorism” definitions. The Center for Constitutional Rights has challenged the use of these frameworks to dehumanize communities and repress social movements for decades. We were the first lawyers to represent Muslim men and boys in Guantanamo - 15 of whom are still detained 24 years later, including our client Guled Duran; we have stood alongside Palestinians and their advocates for decades as “terrorism” allegations have been used to as pretexts suspend their human rights and clamp down on their freedoms; and today, we represent families of victims killed by U.S. strikes on fishing boats in the Caribbean.
The lack of a definition for terrorism does facilitate the weaponization of the law against politically disfavored communities, but as we have seen this year alone, from the US to Palestine, refining the definition is insufficient to the scale of the problem. The conception of terrorism and counter-terrorism, by their very nature, are designed to circumvent due process, deny fair trials, and justify the deprivation of liberty. Counterterrorism has been routinely exploited to perpetrate murder, extrajudicial killing, forcible transfer, and genocide.
CCR believes we must work collectively and urgently not to define, but to dismantle this counterterrorism framework and the post-9/11 “national security” apparatus that has fundamentally altered not only the U.S. legal and political system, but also decimated international human rights architecture and fostered rising authoritarianism globally.
