The concept of “human rights” is one that most educated people would likely claim to understand in a straightforward manner. Upon closer examination, however, scholars and politicians alike have engaged in fierce disagreements about its meaning and scope. Does it primarily encompass, as Samuel Moyn would claim, the right to live one’s life and express one’s political opinions free from the fear of being tortured by one’s government, as occurred under Latin American dictatorships in the 1960s and 1970s? Or is it more expansive, including under its umbrella the rights to quality employment, education, health care, and housing? Or, is it broader even than that? The answer one gives has implications not only for academic debates but also the enforcement of international norms, in light of the existence of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which claims to promote and protect human rights across the globe – so what, exactly, is it promoting and protecting?

As I showed in my recent article “The Mariel Cubans and John Lewis’s Legacy on Human Rights,” US Representative John Lewis, one of the most influential American political figures of the twentieth century, believed that “human rights” encompassed not only all of these concepts but also a more ethereal and abstract idea of recognizing the dignity inherent in each and every individual human being. This paradigm influenced his approach to a wide variety of policy issues.

Although Lewis achieved national prominence for his role in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, and made securing voting rights a key focus of his congressional career, he advocated for many other marginalized groups during his thirty-three years in the US House of Representatives. In November 1987, shortly after the beginning of Lewis’s first term in office, Cuban prisoners being held in Atlanta’s federal penitentiary seized control of the institution and took dozens of hostages. The prisoners, who had fled their homeland for the United States in 1980, were scheduled to be returned to their homeland by the Reagan administration. They feared persecution or worse upon their return to Cuba, leading to the desperate act. After authorities regained control of the penitentiary a week and a half later, Georgia legislators disagreed on how the prisoners should be treated. Conservatives castigated them as a threat to public safety. Lewis, however, argued that the detainees had suffered horribly during incarceration and should be granted compassion and understanding, mobilizing the language of human rights to do so. In the end, owing to diplomatic difficulty between Cuba and the United States, most of the detainees received community release in the US and never returned to their home country.

Lewis’s moral leadership during this episode continued throughout his long career in Congress, and he served as a prominent voice for immigrant advocacy during the fierce political battles of the Clinton administration, the George W. Bush administration, and especially the Trump administration, during which Lewis became one of the key opponents of the child separation policy and other extreme measures.

Michael Camp’s article was published as part of an essay roundtable from the Journal of Law and Religion, “John R. Lewis’s Legacies in Law and Religion”. Find the full issue here.