NAJIT BOARD DECISION ON DRAFT RESOLUTION
SUBMITTED AT 2006 ANNUAL MEETING
The NAJIT Board has accepted and approved the following recommendation submitted by the Advocacy Committee:
The Advocacy Committee recognizes and shares the deep concern of NAJIT members for human rights and proper treatment of prisoners and detainees. This Committee’s members concur, as individuals, in deploring abuses of human rights and violations of human dignity wherever and whenever they occur.
We have determined, however, upon reviewing the draft resolution presented at the 2006 Annual Meeting, and following extensive discussion by e-mail and teleconferences, that as a committee, we do not have adequate knowledge and expertise in international legal conventions to propose a well-grounded and sufficiently detailed resolution to address the points made in the draft. We cannot in good conscience offer to the Board of Directors or to the NAJIT membership a formal interpretation of the Geneva Convention, other international conventions, military regulations, the U.S. Constitution or U.S. legislation, when we have not studied these documents and determined the obligations they impose on members of our association or our profession.
The work of reviewing each of the documents referred to in the draft resolution presented to NAJIT at the 2006 Annual Meeting, verifying content, and accurately describing how each document may apply to interpreters and translators would be lengthy, challenging, and prohibitively costly, in that it would require us to obtain the opinions of legal experts in each of these fields. Furthermore, having reviewed the foundational documents of NAJIT, particularly Article II of the Bylaws, we find that the activities which such a resolution seeks to condemn, fall beyond the purview of judiciary interpreting and translating.
Since we work in the field of judiciary interpreting and translating, we feel competent to make statements about violations of best practice as we observe them directly. We believe, however, that it is the responsibility of other organizations which have taken up the banner of human rights and possible violations of such rights in the course of the U.S. government’s national security activities to analyze these topics and issue public statements about them. We encourage our members, as individuals, to pursue these matters through such organizations.
Our association, like our nation, is made up of a broad array of persons with many different points of view. We believe that we serve our profession best when we focus our public statements on those issues that our members bring to us from their own experience in the courts and in legal settings. There is no evidence that any of our members have been involved in the situations addressed in the proposed resolution of May 18, 2006. We strongly believe that our association should be involved in policy relevant to judiciary interpreters and translators, not in changeable political situations.
We therefore recommend to the board of directors that no resolution on this subject be adopted or offered to the membership.
Respectfully submitted,
NAJIT Advocacy Committee
Accepted and approved by the NAJIT Board of Directors September 28, 2006
The text of the draft resolution and other information pertaining to the annual meeting can be accessed through the Member Portal of the NAJIT website. Visit the Document Library to read the material and the NAJIT News Forum in the Bulletin Board to post comments.