Environmental Justice and Post 9/11 Detentions

(February 2004)

Ryan Schiff & Susan Church, issue editors, write:

This month’s Mass Dissent focuses on two issues: environmental justice and post-September 11th detentions.
As the first article by Quita Sullivan makes clear, environmental justice involves much more than just protecting the environment. The concept of environmental justice says that all people have the right to a clean, healthy environment and that the people themselves should be able to make the decisions that affect the environment in their own communities. For the past ten years, Quita’s organization, Alternatives for Community & Environment, has been working on these issues, and her article highlights some of their efforts.
In the second article, Kyle Loring describes the struggle Roxbury and South End residents have been waging against the biocontainment laboratory that Boston University plans to build in their neighborhood. As his article explains, BU’s behavior has violated the core principles of environmental justice that Quita describes.
The National Lawyers Guild, both nationally and locally, has been active in struggles against the Bush administration’s post-September 11th detentions of immigrants and those it deems “terrorist suspects.” These detentions have frequently violated the most basic notions of due process. People have been held without access to lawyers and without being charged with any crime. Halim Moris describes the problem of the detention and deportation of immigrants suffering from mental illness. Despite court decisions requiring the appointment of counsel to such people, observers from the Guild and its Detention Working Group have found that this protocol is often not followed.
In the final article, Ryan Schiff gives a run down of recent court actions in the cases of Jose Padilla, Yaser Hamdi, and the Guantanamo Bay detainees.
If you are interested in being part of the Guild’s Detention Working Group, please call the office at (617) 227-7335.
Ryan Schiff & Susan Church

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