The trailblazing human rights attorney Michael Ratner has died at the age of 72. For over four decades, Michael Ratner defended, investigated and spoke up for victims of human rights abuses across the world. He served as the longtime head of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Attorney David Cole told The New York Times, quote, “Under his leadership, the center grew from a small but scrappy civil rights organization into one of the leading human rights organizations in the world. He sued some of the most powerful people in the world on behalf of some of the least powerful.” In 2002, the center brought the first case against the George W. Bush administration for the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo. The Supreme Court eventually sided with the center in a landmark 2008 decision when it struck down the law that stripped Guantánamo prisoners of their habeas corpus rights. Ratner began working on Guantánamo in the 1990s, when he fought the first Bush administration’s use of the military base to house Haitian refugees.
Michael Ratner’s activism and human rights work dated back to the 1960s. He was a student at Columbia Law School during the 1968 student strike there. Michael was a clerk for the legendary Federal Judge Constance Baker Motley. When he graduated from law school, she was the first African-American woman judge and protégé of Thurgood Marshall. In a 2004 letter, Constance Baker Motley wrote, “Michael Ratner was in retrospect, the ablest law clerk I have had in my tenure on the bench.”
Michael Ratner joined the Center for Constitutional Rights in 1971. His first case centered on a lawsuit filed on behalf of prisoners killed and injured in the Attica prison uprising in upstate New York. Michael Ratner was deeply involved in Latin America and the Caribbean, challenging U.S. policy in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Puerto Rico and elsewhere. In 1981, he brought the first challenge under the War Powers Resolution to the use of troops in El Salvador, as well as a suit against U.S. officials on behalf of Nicaraguans raped, murdered and tortured by U.S.-backed contras. In 1991, he led the center’s challenge to the authority of President George H.W. Bush to go to war against Iraq without congressional consent.
A decade later, he would become a leading critic of the George W. Bush administration, filing lawsuits related to Guantánamo, torture, domestic surveillance and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He also helped launch the group Palestine Legal to defend the rights of protesters in the U.S. calling for Palestinian human rights. In recent years, he was the chief attorney for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and became a leading critic of the U.S. crackdown on whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.
Reed Brody talking:
from defending human rights in the United States to defending Central American revolutions against the United States, from defending HIV-positive Haitians quarantined in Guantánamo to defending Muslims taken to Guantánamo 10 years later, you know, from defending foreign—from suing American torturers abroad to suing, as we saw, foreign torturers in America, to defending whistleblowers. Over 50 years, Michael was always instinctively on the right side of every battle, fighting the right battle from the right trench. You know, he had this unerring ability to know where to be at the right time.
1984. I had actually just come back from Nicaragua, where I documented systematic atrocities by the U.S.-backed contras, who were trying to undermine the Sandinista revolution. And there was a sit-in at the Federal Building in downtown Manhattan, organized by the National Lawyers Guild. And Michael was there, Bill Kunstler, Arthur Kinoy, Barbara Dudley, Ron Kuby, [Marilyn] Clements. And we were all—we were all arrested. But Michael didn’t stop there. When the International Court of Justice in The Hague ordered that the United States stop funding and supporting the contras, Michael and Jules Lobel and the CCR went into court, saying, “Well, you know, let’s enforce this order.”
And actually, Michael asked me to go down to Nicaragua to talk to Americans who might be in harm’s way if the court—if contra funding continued. And I interviewed and took an affidavit from a friend named Ben Linder, who wrote in his affidavit that if the United States kept funding the contras, he was in danger of life and limb. And, of course, the lawsuit failed. The aid to the—an injunction was not granted. And Ben Linder was killed, the first American to be executed, the only American to be executed, by the U.S.-backed contras in Nicaragua. And then Michael defended the Linder family for many years in their suits against the contras and against the United States.
Michael Smith talking:
I lived around the corner from Michael 30-some years ago. Michael had just gotten elected as the president of the National Lawyers Guild. I was in a four-floor walkup, and he schlepped up one night, and he asked me if I would be on the editorial board of Guild Notes, which is the guild magazine. So he signed me up, and that’s when we started out working together. We did six books together. He did the foreword or the introduction or a chapter in a number of them.
We did the Che Guevara book. Michael greatly loved and admired Che, and he suspected that the U.S. story about Che’s death was BS. And so he did a FOIA request. And years went by, and nothing happened. And then, one day—and he was telling me. We were walking down the street, and he said, “You know,” he said, “I just got this huge box of documents from the FBI and the CIA and the Defense Department and the White House. And what should we do?” So, I was representing Ocean Press at the time. And I called them up, and I said, “I think we’ve got a book here. Can you hold up putting out your catalog ’til we look through it?” And they said, “Sure.” So, Michael and I and my wife Debbie looked through it, and we figured it out, and we put it all together, and we sent it down to Australia. We put out our first book. We were on the show with you, Amy. It was 20 years ago.
And then, out of nowhere, 10 years later, without Michael making a further request, he got another box of documents. And we looked at those. And there had been a lot of historical work done in the meantime. So we were able to take these new documents—I mean, stuff on White House stationery that said, “The troops we trained finally got him,” a memo to Johnson, the president, stuff like that. And we put the story together. And we realized that there was a prior agreement with the Bolivian dictatorship. The CIA had two agents that were running intelligence. The Department of Defense was funding everything from ballots to bullets, funding the Bolivian army that captured Che. The CIA agents were working the intelligence. They captured Che. And they had a prior agreement with the head of the Bolivian military that if they captured, then they’d kill him. And so, that was America’s doing, and we proved that. And that book is all over Cuba. They sell it for 25 cents. It was featured last year at the International Book Fair. It’s all over Argentina, where Che—and it’s even coming out now in Iran in Farsi, and it’s going to be distributed in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. So, Michael made a contribution there.
Che Guevara killed in October 1967 in Bolivia. And the moral responsibility for that, the actual responsibility for the assassination, which was a political murder, lies on the United States. There’s no statute of limitations to murder. The two people that directed the killing are still alive. They’re in Florida.
he deeply believed in democracy and the rule of law. And he didn’t think that capitalism was compatible with that. He thought maybe fascism was, but certainly not—and we can see, what’s going on now, he was absolutely clear-sighted on that. Michael initially started off, like all of us, as, you know, liberals, thinking that the law was a civilized way of solving disputes. It may flawed here or there, but it could be fixed and so on. Well, we all quickly got over that notion. And Michael came to believe that the law was a means of social control by the 1 percent, who would fight to keep their control, by any means necessary, as long as possible. And that was what the law was. And Michael sought to promote true democratic law and to undermine that false ideology that thought that the law we have now is somehow fair. It’s not fair.
Jules Lobel talking:
Michael was a role model and inspiration for many lawyers and activists around the world, including myself. I never would have been involved with the center, and I never would have had the career that I did, if it wasn’t for Michael, who got me involved, urged me to stay involved, and gave me the model of lawyering that I subsequently used.
His model, which I think is used by many people now, but which he pioneered in many respects, is threefold. One is, he never backed down from a fight against oppression, against injustice, no matter how difficult the odds, no matter how hopeless the case seemed to be, no matter how much there was a lack of precedent. He took cases that nobody else would take, for clients that nobody else would represent, you know, whether it was the work in Central America in the ’80s where nobody else would take these cases or the war powers cases or the Haitian cases that Reed talked about or the Guantánamo cases. He stood alone in many cases. You know, now you talk about 600 Guantánamo lawyers. When Michael first said to the center, “We have to take this case,” he was standing alone, and the center was standing alone. There weren’t 600 lawyers behind him. But he was willing to do that because he was unflinching in the face of oppression, and unfearful.
I remember in the war powers case when President Bush, the first President Bush, went to war against Iraq. Ron Dellums and 45 congressmen sued. And Ron Dellums told me, “We called the center, and we called Michael, because we knew you guys would do it. We knew that you guys were willing to take on the Bush administration, and we didn’t know if anybody else was going to do it.” And that’s why he called us.
But secondly, Michael was brilliant in combining legal advocacy and political advocacy. You know, the clip that you had from Beth Stevens, where they brought this case against Gramajo, the former defense minister in Guatemala. and brilliantly sued him by filing the subpoena and the summons while he was graduating from Harvard. Irrespective of what happened legally with the case, Gramajo was finished, because that was the news, front-page news, throughout Guatemala. And when he filed the Guantánamo case, he didn’t have a prayer—he didn’t think he had a prayer of winning, but he was going to do this to, as Susan Anthony said a hundred years ago, keep up the drumbeat of agitation, of political education and agitation against what he thought was an oppressive U.S. policy, and which we now all know is an oppressive U.S. policy. He was brilliant in combining political activism and legal activism.
Peter Weiss and Rhonda Copelon at the center pioneered this. Up until 20, 30 years ago, there had been no suits against foreign dictators, foreign human rights abuses in U.S. courts. U.S. courts said they didn’t have jurisdiction. The center, again, without any precedent, stood alone and said, “We’re going to—we’re going to sue human rights abuses wherever they are in the world.” Michael took that up and sued Gramajo, sued dictators around the world. And now there’s a whole—hundreds of cases, following the lead of Michael and the center, in using international law and using international human rights in U.S. courts.
I just wanted to say one other thing about Michael on this, particularly in international law. He was—he loved people all around the globe. He represented them, met with them, shared their misery, shared their suffering. And one of the things he taught me is to—is to really be with the people, to really go out and meet people, to be compassionate, to be empathetic. And that’s why, I bet you, people all around the globe now are mourning the death of Michael. When I was in Cuba six months ago or so, I met with the foreign—the former foreign minister of Cuba, and the first question he asked me over dinner was: “How’s Michael doing?” Because he knew Michael cared about Cuba and the people in Cuba, and he cared about Michael.
Reed Brody talking:
Michael and his wonderful wife Karen were at the center also of a huge progressive community here in New York. Their children, Jake, an activist with the Immokalee Workers, Ana, a performance artist. Each year, July—the only July 4th softball game in which the Zapatistas played against the ecosocialists, and everybody ended by singing “The Internationale.” You know, this was a—they were the center of a community here.
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Reed Brody
counsel and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch.
Jules Lobel
president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Michael Smith
attorney and a board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights, colleague and close friend of Michael Ratner. He co-authored a book with Michael called Who Killed Che?: How the CIA Got Away with Murder.
— source democracynow.org