Nomination Hearings Held For Key Human Rights Positions

By Holly Burkhalter, Vice President for Government Relations

Two of President Obama’s nominees for important State Department appointments appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 29. Both nominees are strong human rights advocates and enjoyed smooth sailing with democratic and republican Senators at their nomination hearings.

Ambassador Johnny Carson, a distinguished member of the U.S. Foreign Service, will be, if confirmed, the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Ambassador Carson previously served as U.S. Ambassador to Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Uganda.

I got to know Ambassador Carson personally when he took a three-year assignment on Capitol Hill in 1979 as a State Department Fellow and led the staff of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa. My own service as a Foreign Affairs Committee staffer for human rights overlapped with Johnnie’s, and I can say from personal experience how wise, kind, and committed to Africa he is. America is blessed to have him in the important role he will soon take up, and IJM’s work to protect the poorest in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Zambia will surely benefit from having such a strong human rights advocate as the State Department’s highest ranking official on African affairs.

Sitting next to Ambassador Carson was another friend, Lou de Baca, who is President Obama’s nominee to head the State Department Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (TIP). Lou is well known to anti-slavery activists, first as a U.S. prosecutor who investigated and prosecuted a number of important slavery and trafficking cases in the U.S. In recent years, Lou served as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, where, among other things, he shepherded the Trafficking Victims Protection Act to a unanimous vote in the House.

Mr. de Baca reflected on the importance of working with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to combat trafficking. He described how, as a federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, he worked with NGOs to find victims of trafficking and slavery here in the U.S. He went on to say that foreign governments should accept the help of NGOs in combating trafficking in their own countries, and called upon NGOs to work with local law enforcement to that end. I was honored to hear this fine public servant endorse IJM’s own approach of working with local governments abroad, both to find the victims and to achieve perpetrator accountability.

You can read the transcript of Mr. de Baca’s hearing or view the Webcast of the proceedings here.