For a special report on the Commission, the Perry Center Publications Editor-in-Chief Patrick Paterson met with Professor Richard Wilson, Director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic at the Washington College of Law, to discuss the most important cases or reports in the history of the Commission. Professor Wilson, a frequent lecturer at the Perry Center, is a longtime observer of the Commission and Court, where he and his students have presented more than 30 cases. Of the thousands of cases and reports of the Commission, Professor Wilson selected a few that he thought were especially important or influential.
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This article examines the often contentious role that human rights promotion has played in US foreign policy in Latin America. As a longtime interloper from the North, the United States has employed many different strategies, often resulting in the election to participate in foreign countries' domestic conflicts in aid to one side or another. With regard to human rights, the fact of the matter is that the United States has failed to adopt as many human rights treaties as many other South or Central American nations have. In a globalized world more closely linked than ever before, nations are adopting human rights practices that promise to prevent injustices from occurring as they did in the past, a welcome break from the violent past in Latin America. For myriad reasons, including domestic pressures and belief in "American Exceptionalism," the United States has dodged full participation in many international legal and human rights documents, but this practice has already started to harm international cooperation with and perception of US goals abroad. The author concludes his analysis by suggesting that the United States reconsider its earlier defiance against making human rights a fully fledged tenet of its foreign policy in favor of a new, more cooperative stance.
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