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Center for Constitutional Rights

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Center for Constitutional Rights
666 Broadway, 7th Fl.
New York, NY 10012
NY Tel. 212-614-6464
Fax 212-614-6499

Type: Private - Not-for-Profit
On the web: http://www.ccr-ny.org
Employees: 25

Founded in 1966, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) strives to protect human rights in the US. The group focuses on rights guaranteed by the US Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. CCR uses litigation to protest government misconduct and racial, social, and economic injustice. For example, the group has sued a police department for arresting protesters the group says were protesting peacefully and lawfully. CCR also operates the Movement Support Resource Center, which serves the group's education and outreach work. CCR was founded in 1966 by civil rights attorneys Morton Stavis, Arthur Kinoy, Ben Smith, and Willaim Kunstler.

Key numbers for fiscal year ending December, 2007:
Sales: $4.0M

Officers:
Chairperson: Robert Boehm
President: Michael Ratner
Communications Coordinator: Jen Nessel

 
 
Law Encyclopedia: Center For Constitutional Rights
This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CRR) is a nonprofit legal and educational organization dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Human Rights. Since its formation in 1966 by attorneys working for civil rights demonstrators in the South, the CCR has been a forceful advocate of civil rights for all people. The New York City-based organization seeks to halt what it describes as a steady erosion of civil liberties in the United States and elsewhere. The group addresses such areas as international human rights, government misconduct, sexual politics, indigenous peoples' rights, nuclear and environmental hazards, women's rights, civil rights, freedom of the press, racism, electronic surveillance, criminal trials, affirmative action, and abuse of the grand jury process.

Cofounded by attorneys William M. Kunstler and Morton Stavis and others in the heady days of 1960s social activism, the left-leaning CCR describes itself as "committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change." The CCR has consistently generated legal and political controversy. The group had African American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., as one of its first clients and since then it has continued to take on cases for disadvantaged and oppressed people. It has won favorable decisions for such diverse figures as antinuclear leaders in the Micronesian republic of Belau; American Indian protesters at Wounded Knee, South Dakota; and a film company that sought to distribute U.S.-made documentaries in foreign countries without U.S. government interference.

Much of the center's work has involved international causes and foreign clients. In the early 1970s the CCR sued the U.S. government to discover answers regarding U.S. citizens missing in Chile and U.S. involvement in the support of Chilean leader Salvador Allende. The group has broken ground in the battle to establish the right to sue foreign governments or individuals in U.S. courts. In 1986 the CCR represented the government of President Corazon Aquino, of the Philippines, in its fight to recover millions of dollars in assets taken by former dictator Ferdinand Marcos. In another case, Filartiga v. Pena-Irala, 630 F.2d 876 (2d Cir. 1980), the organization won a settlement of $10.4 million for a Paraguayan boy who brought the suit against an exiled dictator of Paraguay who had ordered the boy's torture. In the early and mid-1990s, the CCR also included among its causes the support of United States-Cuba friendship and cooperation and the representation of Puerto Rican political activists seeking independence from the United States.

The CCR also conducts a number of other programs. Its Movement Support Network, started in 1984, provides aid to social activist groups, including legal protection for groups experiencing harassment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other government law enforcement agencies. The Anti-Biased Violence Project (ABVP), established in 1991, uses litigation and education to oppose violence against individuals because of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, and has defended ordinances that curtail hate speech. The CCR's Ella Baker Student Program provides internships to law students. In Greenville, Mississippi, the CCR operates the Voting Rights Project, a community-based voting rights litigation group that works in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee. The CCR also maintains a speakers' bureau and publishes books, pamphlets, and periodicals, the last including Docket and the MSN News.

The CCR maintains its own staff but also works with many lawyers who donate their time pro bono (for free). The group has previously been called the Civil Rights Legal Defense Fund and the Law Center for Constitutional Rights.

 
Wikipedia: Center for Constitutional Rights
Center for Constitutional Rights.
Enlarge
Center for Constitutional Rights.

The Center for Constitutional Rights[1] (CCR) is a non-profit legal advocacy organization based in New York, USA, founded in 1966 by radical American attorney William Kunstler. In recent years, it has been frequently in the news for organizing and providing legal assistance to the people the US Government asserts are terrorists detained in the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp.

Introduction and History

Michael Ratner, current President of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Enlarge
Michael Ratner, current President of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The Center, originally the Law Center for Constitutional Rights, developed when radical lawyers representing American Civil Rights Movement activists in Mississippi saw a need for a privately funded legal center to support litigation. These founding lawyers were Morton Stavis, Arthur Kinoy, Ben Smith and William Kunstler. The Center conceived of itself as a "movement support" organization -- that is, an organization that prioritized bringing cases activists on the ground wanted to see brought, whether or not they could be won in court, for purposes as diverse as raising public awareness of an issue, generating media attention, or energizing activists harassed by local law enforcement in the South. In this regard, the Center differed from more traditional legal non-profits such as the ACLU, which was more focused on bringing winnable cases in order to extend precedents and develop the law, as well as pursue First Amendment issues.

During the 1960s and 1970s the Center brought a diverse array of cases on behalf of civil rights activists, many of which made their way to the Supreme Court. Despite the Center's ready embrace of litigation strategies promising "success without victory" (as the title of CCR board member Jules Lobel's book put it), many of these lawsuits resulted in victories and set lasting precedents. Some of these landmark cases are:

  • Dombrowski v. Pfister, 380 U.S. 479 (1965), establishing an exception to the ordinary rule that federal courts would not enjoin state criminal prosecutions, and allowing such injunctions where allowing a prosecution to go forward under an overbroad state statute regulating expression might result in a substantial loss or impairment of freedom of expression.
  • Founder William Kunstler and co-counsel Leonard Weinglass played a leading role in the case of the Chicago 7 (8), and were themselves charged with 38 counts of contempt for their "vigorous defense".
  • In 1972, the Court unanimously declared in United States v. United States District Court that engaging in domestic electronic surveillance without a warrant is unconstitutional.
  • During the 1970s, the Center for Constitutional Rights brought and won the case Monell v. Department of Social Services (1978), which provided that local governments could be liable in federal court for violating individuals' constitutional rights.

The landmark 1980 decision in Filártiga v. Peña-Irala, using the then-obscure Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) of 1789, opened U.S. courts for victims of human rights crimes to bring suit against perpetrators from anywhere. From the early 1980s onwards, the Center was best known for bringing such claims for violations of international law in United States courts. Past examples include:

  • By working through the courts with the government of the Philippines, CCR achieved a ruling to allow the potentially illegal assets of Ferdinand Marcos to be frozen until a court could adjudiciate the case in Republic of the Philippines v. Marcos.
  • Doe v. Karadzic, where CCR won a $4.5 billion judgment against Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity under the ATCA. The 1995 Second Circuit decision in this case established that rape and sexual violence constituted torture and genocide and laid the groundwork for cases against non-state actors, including multinational corporations.
  • Doe v. Unocal (filed in 1996), an ATCA suit against the transnational energy giant for its alleged complicity in human rights atrocities committed by the Burmese government and military during the construction of the Yadana natural gas pipeline in central Burma. (Claims were settled by the parties in 2005.)
  • Wiwa v. Royal Dutch/Shell (filed in 1996), an ongoing case on behalf of the heirs of Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and others against the international oil company for complicity in human rights violations including the execution of Wiwa and others by the Nigerian military regime.

Since 9/11, CCR has been best known for bringing a variety of cases challenging the Bush administration's detention and interrogation practices in the "Global War on Terror":

  • CCR brought and won the landmark case Rasul v. Bush (2004), establishing that Guantanamo detainees have the right of access to the federal courts.
  • CCR filed a class-action complaint on behalf of the hundreds of so-called "special interest" detainees rounded up in the wake of 9/11 attacks, and subject to a hold-until-cleared policy whereby they would be held in detention without probable cause, even after they had final deportation orders, until they had been cleared by the FBI of any connection to the attacks, Turkmen v. Ashcroft, 2006 WL 1662663 (E.D.N.Y. June 14, 2006).
  • CCR represents Canadian citizen Maher Arar in his suit against federal officials over their actions that resulted in his transfer to Syria for 374 days of detention and torture, Arar v. Ashcroft, 414 F. Supp.2d 250 (E.D.N.Y. 2006).
  • CCR brought one of the first two suits challenging the NSA warrantless surveillance program, Center for Constitutional Rights v. Bush.

Other prominent areas of litigation include:

  • In 1988, obtained permanent injunction creating buffer zone around abortion clinics where anti-abortion group "Operation Rescue" could not approach women seeking medical services, NOW v. Terry.
  • In 1989, CCR lawyers won in the Supreme Court the case establishing that flag burning is expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment, Texas v. Johnson.
  • Since 1998, CCR has brought a series of cases successfully challenging the federal material support statute, Humanitarian Law Project v. Reno.
  • In 1999, continuing a series of clashes with U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, CCR secured the release of Hany Kiareldeen in a precedent-setting case on the use of secret evidence in deportation trials.

The CCR has been active in a wide range of other fields, from providing legal services to U.S. servicemen accused of criminal conduct[2] during the Vietnam Conflict to government corruption in Puerto Rico and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Center also has a leading role in challenging the legal restrictions the United States government imposes on travelers to Cuba. The Center was invovled in the last legal challenge to the travel ban to reach the Supreme Court, Regan v. Wald, 468 U.S. 222 (1984), and has represented some 425 persons subjected to civil penalties prosecutions by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Department of the Treasury.

The current organization was formed from the merger of the original Center for Constitutional Rights (formed in 1966 by Kunstler, Kinoy, Stavis and Smith) and the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC).

Current Activities and Litigation

  • In the wake of the Rasul decision, CCR has coordinated the filing and litigation of several hundred habeas corpus petitions on behalf of Guantanamo Bay detainees. CCR directly represents a number of these detainees, including Mohammed Al-Qahtani and Majid Khan.
  • CCR has sought criminal investigation in Germany of U.S. officials, notably United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for alleged war crimes in the Abu Ghraib prison.
  • CCR has called for the impeachment[3] of US President George W. Bush.
  • CCR filed a civil damages action against former Israeli Shin Bet head Avi Dichter for his role in the bombing of an apartment complex in 2002 in Gaza. The case was dismissed by a U.S. district court in May 2007 and is now on appeal.[4]
  • In March 2005, CCR filed Corrie v. Caterpillar, alleging that Caterpillar, Inc. violated international and state law by providing specially designed bulldozers to the Israeli Defense Forces that it knew would be used to demolish homes and endanger civilians. The suit was dismissed by the district court in November 2005 and is pending appeal to the Ninth Circuit.
  • In December 2005, CCR filed suit against Lt. Gen. (ret.) Moshe Ya’alon, former Head of the Intelligence Branch and former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), for war crimes and other human rights violations in connection with the hundreds of civilian deaths and injuries in the 1996 shelling of a United Nations compound in Qana, in the south of Lebanon. In December 2006 the district court dismissed the suit, Belhas v. Ya'alon, ruling that General Ya'alon was acting in his official capacity in the Israeli Defense Forces and possesses immunity.
  • CCR has challenged monopolistic prison telephone contracts in New York State by which prisoners' families can be charged as much as six times the average collect call rate for calls from their incarcerated loved ones. The challenges have proceeded both in the courts and through a grassroots, state-wide campaign.
  • The Center is counsel to the Vulcan Society, the organization of black firefighters in the New York City Fire Department. EEOC charges filed by the Center resulted in a lawsuit (Vulcan Society v. City of New York) filed by the United States Department of Justice against the City of New York, challenging the use of the written firefighter examination to select new FDNY hires.

Criticism

  • Matthew Vadum of Capital Research Center, a conservative non-profit organization which aims to study non-profit organizations, called the Center for Constitutional Rights The Terrorists' Legal Team because of his belief that CCR is "an ultra-leftist public-interest law firm" that "has protected the supposed constitutional rights of those who would destroy the United States." [5]
  • According to NGO Monitor, an Israeli non-governmental organization with the stated aim of monitoring other non-governmental organizations in the Middle East, the Center for Constitutional Rights has a biased political position against Israel. NGO Monitor writes, "CCR consistently disregards the context of terror, denies Israel’s right to self-defense, and accuses it of deliberately targeting civilians."[6]

Trivia

  • Rachel Meeropol, an attorney for the CCR is the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted and executed for providing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.
  • The merger between CCR and the ECLC was marked by a wedding ceremony with the groom, Arthur Kinoy of CCR, walking down the aisle with the bride, Edith Tiger of ECLC.

See also

References

  1. ^ The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) is a non-profit legal and educational organization aimed to protect and advance the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
  2. ^ CCR: Our History
  3. ^ CCR: Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush
  4. ^ Judge dismissed New York lawsuit blaming deaths on ex-Israeli security chief, Larry Neumeister, Associated Press, May 2, 2007
  5. ^ Vadum, Matthew (2006-10-03). The Terrorists' Legal Team. Retrieved on 2007-08-08.
  6. ^ Center for Constitutional Rights: Serial Abuse of International Law (2007-07-17). Retrieved on 2007-08-08.

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Hoover's Profile. ©2008 Hoover's, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Law Encyclopedia. West's Encyclopedia of American Law. Copyright © 1998 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Center for Constitutional Rights" Read more

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