Policy, Legislation, & Governance (PLuG)

Policy, Legislation, you, and Governance (PLuG) Working Group (The “u” is YOU)

This working group will develop proposals for implementing human rights legislation at the City and, later, County levels. We hope to devise a Blueprint for making Pittsburgh a human rights city in a meaningful way and a scorecard for holding city government accountable. This work involves creativity, research, outreach, and determination! Together we want to put teeth into Pittsburgh’s commitment to human rights to help leverage change in all policy areas and in city government operations.

Resources and Background Materials We recommend you have a look at Mayor Gainey’s Transition Report and at the PGH HRCA response. Also, the following resources were produced by people like us to help local advocates integrate human rights into local government policies and local practices.

• Global Charter Agenda on Human Rights in the City, A draft charter that combines insights from communities around the world, supported by United Cities and Local Governments
• A Cross-City Report on Obstacles to U.S. Implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination & how Human Rights Cities Can be a Remedy, U.S. Human Rights Cities Alliance
• Bringing Human Rights Home, Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute;
• UN Resources on cities and human rights from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights;
• Human Rights Go Local, A series of publications of UNESCO and UN HABITAT
• Human Rights Budgeting Resources, The Government of Scotland has worked to integrate human rights into local budgeting practices, and has developed useful tools to support local governments in orienting budgets to reflect values of human rights.

Budgets are a key sign of a government's values. So, if human rights are not in there, what's being said is that they are not a value worth counting.

Meetings TBD. (Please contact Michael Goodhart for more information: goodhart@pitt.edu.)