About the Institute for Advancement of Justice and Human Rights

By admission of a distinguished legal scholar who, in 2017, resigned as a prominent 7th Circuit federal judge in protest, self-represented litigants are treated by judges as “a kind of trash not worth the time”. In a study beginning in 2018, measurements of 10 representative state and federal courts over a period exceeding seven years, including review of historical legal cases, provide the statistical prediction that every court in the United States deprives pro se litigants of Justice by degrees or altogether, and every judge violates human rights. Statistics predict that such litigants will be subjected to increasingly cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment in every court and will be punished by judges without lawful justification, violating substantive Justice. Within the records of judicial treatment of pro se litigants are found fact patterns that report severe pain and suffering induced by courts, and intentional acts by judges that violate human rights principles and treaties.

Disabled people, in particular, are told that justice awaits them in courtrooms—if only they can perform. For many with invisible disabilities, the very act of adversarial participation without meaningful accommodation is not neutral, but neurologically and psychologically traumatic. The judicial treatment of disabled litigants, particularly those with invisible disabilities, deviates radically from what ordinary people expect from the courts, and reasonable people would find cruel, inhuman, and degrading, which disability laws identify as discriminatory. While courts promise disability accommodations, judges do not provide accommodations or human rights to disabled litigants according to controlling laws. Many pro se litigants develop injury and disability as a result of their judicial treatment, become unequal in opportunity for success in litigation to their opponent, and are assured of injustice in the courts. Unethical attorneys exploit this systemic policy of non-compliance with human rights and the structural inequality in due process for unjust gain, and injustice. The study confirms that there is NO domestic mechanism for relief, remedy or punishment of these prohibited acts.

The seven-year study demonstrates that judges of state and federal laws behave consistently, committing prohibited acts as a norm, and stealthily justify and conceal their human rights violations through the creation of evidence and procedural justifications, with portrayal of their prohibited acts as lawful sanctions for alleged non-compliance and impropriety by the litigants. The justifications and concealments fail scrutiny under logic, reason, and law, but cannot be challenged through the courts, ensuring that the injustice is predictable and permanent. Under the courts' monopoly over jurisprudence and the lack of independent human rights oversight, the judicial process itself has become pathological by systemic judicial policy. Legal ethics are impotentiated to the degree that they are blind to human rights, and cannot be used to stop judicial abuse and torture of human beings, measured by health records, procedural conduct, and susbtantive outcomes in diverse cases. Jurisprudence inflicts harm and allows it to go unnamed and uncorrectable. Human rights principle and treaties, whose recognition and strict enforcement are the cornerstones of justice in human society, are disrespected by courts, and ignored by judges, who systemically collaborate to suppress treaties and principles that are resonant with the unenumerated rights enshrined in the US Constitution.

Under human rights principles and treaties, it is well-understood that human rights compliance must not be measured by those who violate human rights, but by an independent and impratial and ethical independent investigation that gives legitimacy to a determination of prohibited acts. As human rights experts have authoritatively identified, and as a prominent international human rights standard requires, we the People of the United States of America do not have an independent human rights investigative body that may be used as a resource for all of us to ensure our tri-branch government's compliance with human rights both at the federal and state levels. Attempts to create this investigative body, and keep it independent of government, have failed by lack of cooperation with proposals for corrective action, and by deliberate violation of the investigation standard by government.

In order to address the non-compliance, and to address prohibited conduct that is promoted and enacted by the judicial branch of government, one approach is for the People to systemically review the conduct by judges and the orders and decisions by courts throughout the United States, and provide reporting and analysis based on standards that would be respected by international human rights experts and Special Rapporteurs, by legal scholars and academics, by objective, scientifc and intellectual standards in diverse fields including medicine, psychology, sociology and others, and most importantly, respected by the ordinary reasonable person whose innate sense of justice is the litmus for legitimacy of judges and courts. As the American Bar Association reported in its president's letter to the US Supreme Court in 2023, that court's lowest legitimacy in history required correction. Legitimacy is the social basis for trust in our judges and courts, and as judicial ethics codes make very clear, without the People's trust, courts cannot and must not function. Therefore, the People's ever-increasing mistrust in our justice system must be addressed by the People's initiative in the continuing absence of judicial reform. By leveraging free speech and by oversight of our courts and judges through research and investigation, an independent NGO could provide a mirror to judges reflecting their conduct and adjudication, and inform them of issues. Through discourse that invites thought and response, this NGO could achieve the elevation of judicial standards and education on laws that are discarded and deprecated, and therefore causing injustice and injury to litigants in our courts.

Our Mission

The Institute for Advancement of Justice and Human Rights (IAJ) is dedicated to advancing justice and human rights through research, investigation, and accountability in judicial systems worldwide. On behalf of the People, it also provides a critical and missing component of the United Nations Istanbul Protocol for the investigation of substantially grounded allegations of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and torture by persons and entities who act under color of authority within the United States and its territories. This missing component of international human rights compliance is necessary because judges, courts and the judicial process, which are the last bastion of Justice and human rights compliance in the United States, fail to recognize, protect and enforce human rights according to human rights treaties and international standards. Over-simplistically stated, the IAJ's function includes the independent investigation of discrimination and ill-treatment of litigants by judges and courts, accoding to the highest international human rights standards that are binding on the United States of America (by operation of the absolute prohibitions under the jus cogens of customary international law and the norms of civilized society, and Artcile 18 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and Article VI of the US Constitution). The Institute also reaches beyond the highest interntional human rights standards and seeks to evolve those standards to higher levels.

The Essential Need for the IAJ

The IAJ was required to come into existence as an NGO upon discovery by the Private Attorney General that the United States of America does not implement an independent human rights investigative body as required by the absolute prohibition against torture, and expressed in the UN Istanbul Protocol, and confirmed by the highest authority on torture in the world. Upon determination of systemic judicial discrimination and human rights violations in every state and federal court by statistical methods and direct evaluation of 10 state and federal courts and over 40 judges over a span of 7 years, including the US Supreme Court, the function of the IAJ is necessarily required for the elimination of systemic discrimination and human rights violations in courts by virtue of its independence and its expertize. Thus the IAJ provides a National Oversight Committee on Judicial Torture.

The Concluding Observations by the UN Committee Against Torture (CAT/C/USA/CO/3-5) demonstrate the need for the creation of the IAJ. The IAJ contrasts U.S. assertions (CAT/C/USA/3-5 (2014)) with the Committee's concluding observations (CAT/C/USA/CO/3-5), which criticized many U.S. practices, and identifies failures of domestic implementation in areas like judicial torture, medical neglect, and disability discrimination. CAT/C/USA/3-5 defends the U.S. use of RUDs—notably, its reservation limiting the definition of torture to acts of "extreme" pain. However, under Article 18 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT), such reservations are severable if they undermine the object and purpose of the treaty. The IAJ is aligned with the world highest authority on torture (the CAT), and explicitly rejects the limiting RUDs outlined in the U.S.' report. The IAJ affirms the international definition of torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment as interpreted by the Committee Against Torture, Special Rapporteurs, and international courts. CAT/C/USA/3-5 focuses heavily on law enforcement and detention but fails to acknowledge or regulate torture and CIDT in judicial proceedings, particularly against a) pro se (self-represented) litigants, b) disabled or ill litigants, c) persons coerced into litigation under threat of penalty. The IAJ fills this doctrinal and procedural vacuum by treating CAT/C/USA/3-5 as 1) a partial and self-serving interpretation of UNCAT obligations, 2) a basis for IAJ corrective authority, ensuring availability of scholarly reasoning and discourse of laws identifying the need for correction and enforcement where U.S. domestic mechanisms have failed. Because CAT/C/USA/3-5 admits that the U.S. lacks certain preventive mechanisms -- especially independent, non-governmental investigative bodies -- it implicitly justifies the long-overdue creation of the IAJ under international human rights law, including the UN Istanbul Protocol and UN Principles on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture.

The IAJ notes that systemic judicial discrimination and human rights violations fundamentally undermine Justice and the US Constitution and human rights treaties, and that facts being reported to the IAJ indicate large numbers of human beings are the subject of this prevalent judicial misconduct (particulary in the Family courts), who are typically disadvantaged or disabled. The IAJ respectfully recognizes the service of distinguished legal scholar and federal appellate judge Richard Posner and his public exposure of the unfortunate reality that most judges regard pro se litigants as a "kind of trash not worth the time" (Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Journal 2017) and his brief advocacy for the self-represented litigants through his charity. While the IAJ, unlike judge Posner's charity, cannot and will not give legal advice, its model findings and rulings should serve as a resource identifying how human rights reshape procedural and substantive adjudication involving pro se and disabled litigants, identifying SYSTEMIC issues which require judicial attention, and identify judicially responsive correction under Article VI personal obedience of judges to treaties, Article III "good Behaviour" and codes of judicial conduct.

Core Values

Our Work