by AMANDA WILSON
In a groundbreaking decision that affirms domestic violence as an international human rights issue, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has ruled that the U.S. should do more to protect victims of domestic violence.
The ruling, officially made in July, was detailed in a report officially released to the public here on Wednesday.
The decision marks the first time that an international tribunal has found that the U.S. violated the rights of a domestic violence survivor. It also specifically articulates that failure to respond to domestic violence can constitute a human rights violation by the U.S. government.
When Jessica Gonzales called police in Castle Rock Colorado on Jun. 22, 1999 begging them to enforce a restraining order against her estranged husband and reporting he had abducted her three daughters, the police told her there was nothing they could do.
Even as Gonzales called in repeated pleas for help from local police, her estranged husband murdered the three girls and was himself subsequently killed in a shootout with police later that same night.
In the years that followed, Gonzales, who now goes by Lenahan, took her complaint against local police all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 2005 ruled that, contrary to what Lenahan had been told by local authorities, Colorado state law did not actually require state police to enforce restraining orders.
Jessica Lenahan did not give up but instead took her case, with support from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), to the IACHR, the international human rights tribunal of the Washington-based Organisation of American States (OAS), a 35-member international body.
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