Contact

Click here for a confidential contact or call:

1-212-350-2774

Human Rights

This archive displays posts tagged as relevant to human rights laws. You may also be interested in the following pages:

Page 1 of 2

Whistleblower Spotlight: Jailed Iranian Activist Narges Mohammadi

Posted  12/14/23
red tape over person mouth
Whistleblowers come in all shapes and sizes.  Some they write movies about, gaining fame (and sometimes fortune) in the process.  Others go in the opposite direction, victimized for their temerity; for daring to sound the alarm when something rubs against their moral compass.  Still others speak their truth quietly, just getting the job done without fanfare or rebuke so they can sleep better at night.  Regardless...

Can the False Claims Act Protect Immigration Detainees from Forced Labor?

Posted  07/2/21
person holding onto prison bars
By William Greenlaw A recent human rights case raises a novel question of False Claims Act applicability: when private immigration detention facilities defraud the government by forcing individuals into labor. The federal government has a vast regulatory and statutory scheme meant to stop federal contractors from using trafficked labor. But forced labor in detention facilities has historically been overlooked....

Arizona Software Glitch Keeps Prisoners Incarcerated, Until the Whistleblowers Showed Up

Posted  03/5/21
Hands grasping around prison bars
In a story straight out of a dystopian novel, a faulty computer system has kept Arizona prisoners locked up beyond their release date.  A government contractor, Business & Decision, North America, built a system that is supposed to calculate each person’s release date.  In exchange, the contractor received $24 million from the state.  The system, however, didn’t work, leaving hundreds of people behind bars who...

Constantine Cannon continues its commitment to ending abuses in private detention facilities

Posted  02/17/21
wired fence with building in background
This week, Constantine Cannon is proud to continue its representation as pro bono counsel to Immigrant Legal Resource Center, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom for Immigrants in supporting California’s efforts to end the use of private immigration detention facilities in the state.  Last spring, we filed a “friend of the court” brief for these same organizations in the district court in opposition to the Geo...

2020 Whistleblower of the Year Candidate – Dawn Wooten

Posted  01/5/21
barbed wired fence
Privately run immigration detention facilities have been a stain on our nation’s reputation for years now.  The refugees and other immigrants who are detained within their walls suffer family separation, inadequate medical care, lack of basic necessities, inedible food, psychological torture, and even death from easily treatable diseases due to flimsy infection controls.  The current pandemic crisis only amplifies...

Why whistleblower advocates should care about the Alien Tort Statute

Posted  12/7/20
By Sarah “Poppy” Alexander
gavel, binder and liberty scale
False Claims Act (FCA) lawyers love to talk about our statute’s robust history, signed by Abe Lincoln to hold corporations accountable for cheating the government during the Civil War.  The Alien Tort Statute (ATS) is a liability statute with an even longer history—passed as part of the First Judiciary Act in 1789, the ATS grants federal jurisdiction to cases concerning torts in violation of the law of nations. ...

Putting a Stop to Illegal Imports from Forced Uyghur Labor

Posted  09/18/20
barbed wire
The world has watched in horror as, starting in 2018, up to two million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have been arrested, relocated, or otherwise forced into internment centers in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China.  The government of the People’s Republic of China has separated thousands of Uyghur children from parents, forced methods of control on women, and inflicted physical and psychological...

Constantine Cannon Files Amicus Brief in Support of California’s Effort to Curb Private Prison Company Abuses

Posted  03/13/20
By Sarah “Poppy” Alexander
prison-silhouette
Constantine Cannon is proud to represent three leading immigrants rights organizations, Human Rights Watch, Immigrant Legal Resource Center, and Freedom For Immigrants in filing a “friend of the court,” or amicus brief, in two cases related to California’s right to ban private prison companies.  Last year, California enacted AB 32, which barred private prison companies from operating within the state.  The...

Immigration Detention Facilities Continue to Pose Fraud Risks

Posted  05/9/19
By Sarah “Poppy” Alexander
Child Behind a Fence
Last summer, we wrote about the fraud risks inherent in the massive increase in government spending for immigration detention. Almost one year later, a child’s tragic death again calls attention to failures at the immigration facilities that maintain ever increasing government contracts. On April 30, 2019, a sixteen-year-old boy died at a Southwest Key facility in Brownsville, TX, two weeks after arriving in the...

The Big Business of Detaining Families Creates a Serious Fraud Risk

Posted  06/21/18
By Poppy Alexander The massive public outcry about family separations at the border has spotlighted an area of federal spending that often gets ignored-the massive business that is immigration detention for children and families. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of HHS, spent approximately $3.4 billion on private companies to shelter and detain these kids in just the last four years. Yet little data...
1 2