A phony human rights case

Published October 14, 2007 at midnight

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A statement by attorney Caroline Bettinger-Lopez provides a revealing perspective with which to view the announcement that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights plans to examine the conduct of Castle Rock police in the 1999 murders of Rebecca, Katheryn and Leslie Gonzales by their father, Simon Gonzales.

"There's no enforcement authority, but what there is, is a lot of moral authority," Bettinger-Lopez, who filed the petition on behalf of the girls' mother, Jessica Lenahan, told the Rocky.

There is no minimizing the senseless killing of three sisters, ages 10, 8 and 7, nor the loss their mother lives with daily. But this quote and many others from those who brought this case suggest a distorted agenda. In doing so, they are ignoring facts, the sound reasoning of a 7-2 ruling two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court and the realities of law enforcement in order to exploit personal grief and bitterness to further what is essentially a political cause.

In effect, they want to hold police liable for failing to prevent a certain category of crime - domestic violence by those under restraining orders. It's a wholly unreasonable expectation and will embroil police in endless rounds of litigation and recrimination.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is an organ of the Organization of American States. Typically, human rights violations, which the commission defends, involve gross or systematic abuse of citizens by governments, or instances where private parties run roughshod over others, usually without a government stepping in to stop or punish them. The term has little in common with an incident in which a lone murderer kills his own kids and then in turn is shot by police.

The commission, which says it has more than 800 cases of alleged human rights violations pending, accepted 55 cases from 17 OAS countries in 2006. The majority concerned abuses by ruling governments, such as arrest and detention without formal charges, repression of free speech, state-approved murder, deportation and suppression of political freedom. Four of the 55 cases involved the United States (a death row inmate in Tennessee, two deportation matters and a dispute regarding World War II Japanese internment reparations), and two originated in Canada.

All are a far cry from inspecting how a local police department responded to a domestic situation in which a restraining order had been issued.

The next step in the commission's review of this case is called the merits phase. As Columbia Law School, where Bettinger-Lopez is based, puts it, "The commission will decide whether the U.S. and the Castle Rock Police Department violated the human rights of Jessica Gonzales (now Lenahan) and her children, specifically the rights to life, nondiscrimination, family/life unity, due process, petition the government, and the rights of domestic violence victims and their children to special protections."

The response of the United States to a previous commission finding of supposed rights violations in a different incident seems particularly appropriate for the Castle Rock case as well. The U.S. pointed out that however the commission interprets the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, "the Declaration is no more than a recommendation to the American States. Accordingly, the Declaration does not create legally binding obligations and therefore cannot be 'violated.' "

The absurdity of the commission's grandstand play should be abundantly obvious to all.

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