Thread by @cadwaladragon

Okay, maybe you’ve seen me posting about why US lawyers at the southern border should be collecting evidence that MX lawyers can use to challenge the gov of MX (GOM) facilitation of US border policies in MX courts. Here’s my best attempt at a thread explaining why.

First, US courts aren’t saving us. This isn’t surprising, and I’m not suggesting that we abandon litigation in the US. Just acknowledge that US court litigation isn't a panacea.

Meanwhile, advocates in MX have challenged GOM’s facilitation of US border policies in MX, and they’ve had some real success. For example: imumi.org/2022/11/24/org…

Why are MX advocates seeing some success on this front? I’m not a MX lawyer, but here are a couple differences b/w MX and US law that matter. 1. MX ratifies most int’l human rights treaties. For the US, singing, let alone ratifying, these treaties is the exception.

US lawyers are generally taught that int’l law doesn’t matter much in the US. This is not untrue, but bears breaking down. First refugee law is literally international law, coming from the 1951 Refugee Convention, which the US has ratified and implemented domestically.

Second, the US has ratified other important int’l human rights treaties. So int’l law does matter, but the US does not engage much in this sphere because it’s a hegemon and doesn’t want to be held responsible to higher standards through int’l instruments and institutions.

The result is that US lawyers, even those working on human rights issues, don’t familiarize themselves enough w int’l human rights treaties or jurisprudence & often underestimate how important these things are in not only the US but also in also other countries.

We end up with US lawyers going into MX, documenting human rights violations on MX soil, but still applying a US-centric framework, which results in miscategorization and weaker evidentiary record (more on this later).

2. MX has subjected itself to the jurisdiction (jx) of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), meaning that violations of human rights can be eventually brought before the IACtHR.

In an important case called Radilla Pacheco in which the IACtHR held MX accountable for enforced disappearance, the GOM did a major overhaul of their constitution & passed critical domestic legislation to comply with the IACtHR’s orders and vault the legal status of human rights.

3. As a result of that IACtHR case, this is what Art. 1 of the MX Constitution now looks like:

Here’s my translation of the relevant text: "In MX, all people will enjoy the human rights recognized in this Constitution and in the international treaties of which MX is a part …"

"Human rights norms will be interpreted in conformity with this Constitution and international treaties in the manner always favoring the broadest protection to the people."

So, MX ratifies int’l human rights treaties, giving people more rights, it binds itself to the decisions of IACtHR (an important enforcement mechanism), & it heightens human rights to Art. 1 of its Constitution & puts int’l treaty human rights on par w constitutional human rights

The US falls short on all of these measures by not ratifying int’l human rights treaties, not subjecting itself to the jx of IACtHR, and by creating a system in which increasingly conservative courts place the supremacy of their interpretation of the US Constitution above all.

All this is to say, there are additional tools and a much more friendly *written* legal intention to protect human rights in MX than in the US.

My point is not that MX is a human rights Shangri-la or that MX is a safer place (just ask the asylum seekers trapped at MX’s northern border, who are the focus of this thread) but rather that the MX legal landscape presents important opportunities that lawyers must recognize.

If, then, MX is a different country with different laws, US lawyers documenting human rights violations on MX soil should work with MX lawyers to ensure that what they are documenting is appropriately analyzed according to GOM’s domestic and int’l human rights obligations.

When we work together to document things to be used in both US and MX courts, we improve the evidentiary record to succeed on both sides of the border in shutting down these heinous US border policies.

I believe there is room for improvement on this front, as I’ll show with some examples of mislabeling enforced disappearances under MX, Inter-American, and int’l human rights law as mere “kidnappings.”

Will write about the importance of documenting enforced disappearances of asylum seekers subjected to #Title42 and #RemainInMexico later. It's lunchtime.