Natural disasters are becoming more common and destructive. There is a critical need to build accessible legal services for vulnerable populations that suffer disproportionately from natural disasters. Law schools, legal clinics, and law professors are well-positioned to serve vulnerable and marginalized communities and can address the issues of poverty and race that exacerbate the harm caused by natural disasters. Access to justice and civil legal aid after natural disasters should be rooted in preparedness and planning before the disaster. Understanding the nature of natural disasters, the ecosystem of response systems, existing networks, common legal issues, and the typical arc of recovery will help law schools, legal clinics, and lawyers prepare and plan for response. The models and lessons discussed in this chapter may help provide increased post disaster legal services to vulnerable people to empower them with confidence and tools to serve their communities. This chapter builds on lessons learned from previous natural disasters and offers information and insights on responsive program design, professionalism, and disaster response systems. Building a framework for institutional responses in the legal academy can advance and improve access to justice for vulnerable communities recovering after a disaster so that they can survive, rebuild and return home.

Following U.S. government failures before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina, social justice organizers and advocates increasingly turned to human rights frameworks to challenge the state. The 2005 hurricane revealed the human cost of domestic disaster policy, with regard to both disaster evacuation and shelter. Almost exactly three years later, Hurricane Gustav hit the Gulf Coast, triggering the largest evacuation in Louisiana history. As the first significant post-Katrina disaster event in the greater New Orleans area, Gustav provides an important opportunity to examine the ways in which community organizers have contested domestic disaster policy. Using sheltering policy as an example, we explore social movement efforts to resist and transform U.S. disaster politics. In particular, we examine the emergence of a human rights discourse for reframing disaster-related social problems. In light of the expansion of domestic human rights activity sparked by the Gulf Coast hurricanes (Luft 2009; Soohoo, Albisa, and Davis 2008), we believe this local case study has broader significance for both the practice and the scholarship of U.S. human rights.

For at least ten years before Hurricane Katrina, there was a growing resurgence of domestic human rights movement activity (Soohoo et al. 2008). Katrina laid bare not only the limitations of U.S. disaster policy but also the social contract to provide well-being more generally. These contradictions further inspired national and local movement actors to turn to human rights frameworks to contest the state's handling of both the disaster and the recovery.

INTRODUCTION

THE HISTORY of the GATT's legal relationship with developing countries points to one major question throughout. Is the current GATT legal policy in the best interest of the developing countries themselves, or would developing countries achieve better results if they were to agree to a legal policy based on the GATT's two main principles of reciprocity and non-discrimination?

This question has been debated ever since 1947. It is still being debated today. Despite the GATT's repeated formal endorsement of the principle of non-reciprocal and preferential treatment, opposition to that principle is probably greater today than at any other time. The governments of developed countries sign the declarations, but they do not believe in what they are doing. A growing number of governments in developing countries have doubts. And commentators, especially those from developed countries, become more critical every year.

The disagreement has a paralyzing effect on GATT reform. All participants agree that the GATT system has been losing ground since the mid-1970s and that it needs to move forward in order to regain its effectiveness. On matters of policy towards developing countries, however, the GATT membership finds itself pulling in opposite directions, with one group of countries calling for extension of the current policy while another group asks that it be discarded as a failure.

IN THE YEARS following the 1954 Review Session, the question of the GATT's relationship to developing countries continued to grow in importance. According to Karin Kock, the Swedish expert on GATT affairs, the issue became critical once it became clear that a large number of British and French colonies were soon to achieve independence. “Cold War” competition for the loyalty of these emerging countries intensified when the Soviet Union began to press for the creation of a global trade organization, within the United Nations, that would provide an alternative to the Western-dominated GATT. The prospect of a rival United Nations organization grew more substantial each year and finally materialized in the form of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), formally constituted in 1964.

CHANGES IN BARGAINING POWER

By the early 1960s, GATT relations between developed and developing countries had become almost totally centered on competition with UNCTAD in the making. The UNCTAD threat considerably augmented the bargaining power of developing countries. Developed countries believed that a bloc decision not to participate in the GATT would be seriously damaging to Western political interests; they were therefore willing to pay a price to avoid it. Developing countries knew this and asked for a great deal. In the end, however, the UNCTAD threat had its limits. Developing countries knew that the GATT was useful to them and they knew that a United Nations type organization might not be able to replace it.

THE FIRST half of the 1980s has produced no important change of direction in developing-country policy. The events of this period could generally be described as a further elaboration of the main themes laid down in the previous twenty years. At the level of formal recognition, the commitment of governments to current developing-country policy has continued to escalate. Practical elaboration of these general principles has also moved ahead slightly, but not with the same sense of progress. Indeed, there is a growing sense that the practical benefits of this policy may be very small, perhaps even non-existent.

The current situation, then, presents a rather odd picture of things moving in different directions. Even though there is an increasing awareness of problems at the implementing level, the formal commitment to the current policy continues to get stronger every year. As criticism of the policies of developing countries increases, so do the rhetorical and institutional barriers to reconsideration.

The present chapter describes recent developments in three areas which illustrate the current situation.

EMERGING INTERNATIONAL LAW OF DEVELOPMENT

In 1974, the United Nations adopted two major resolutions, one calling for the New International Economic Order and the other declaring a Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. Shortly after, legal experts in various parts of the world began working in earnest on the question of whether the principles affirmed in these documents deserved to be recognized as rights and obligations of international law proper.

INTRODUCTION

ON 30 OCTOBER 1947, governments of twenty-three countries signed the Final Act of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The General Agreement created a legal framework for a mutual reduction in tariffs negotiated between the signatory governments. It contained, first, each government's commitment to reduce tariffs (called its Schedule of Concessions) and, second, a code of behavior regulating other forms of government interference with international trade.

The GATT code of behavior rested on three central principles. The first was that while governments would not be prohibited from protecting domestic industries against foreign competition, all such protection should be in the form of tariffs. Under this first principle, governments accepted the obligation to eliminate the many other kinds of non-tariff measures affecting trade that had become common in the pre-war years – above all, restrictions limiting the quantity of imports allowed. The second principle was that while there would be no a priori limits on tariff levels, governments would participate in periodic negotiations aimed at gradually reducing existing levels. The third was the most-favored-nation (MFN) principle, requiring governments to treat the trade of all other GATT countries equally. Under the MFN principle, any advantage given to one GATT country had to be given immediately, and unconditionally, to every other GATT country.

THE SCHEDULING of the UNCTAD conference for the spring of 1964 precipitated an effort within the GATT to demonstrate more forcefully its commitment to the interests of developing countries. The first step was a decision to draft amendments to the legal text of the General Agreement that would consolidate the various strands of the GATT's emerging policy towards developing countries. Initially, it was contemplated that the new legal text would be placed in Article XVIII. The new text grew so long, however, that at the last moment it was re-packaged as a new Part IV of the General Agreement.

PART IV OF THE GATT

The importance of Part IV is not easy to describe. From a technical point of view, Part IV added nothing to the existing legal relationship between developed and developing countries. Part IV was only a slightly more impressive statement of the urgent but non-binding texts that the Action Program had been issuing over the preceding five years, giving them a permanent form in the text of the General Agreement. The language of Part IV was a bit more legalistic, giving the illusion of greater commitment. Indeed, the title of the new Article XXXVII, “Commitments”, actually said so. In fact, however, the text of Part IV contained no definable legal obligations.

THE PRESENT chapter examines the effect that GATT legal policy has on the decision-making process of the governments of developing countries. The reason for beginning here is the author's conviction that a government's own trade-policy decisions are the most important determinant of its economic welfare. It is here that the GATT's legal policy can make its most important contribution to developing-country welfare or do the greatest harm.

The chapter begins with what might be called a model – a rather lengthy analysis of how the decision-making process of the governments in developed countries is affected by the GATT legal obligations they have accepted. This model is then used to consider how decision-making processes in developing-country governments would be affected by either of two GATT legal policies – (i) the GATT's current no-obligations policy towards developing countries and (ii) an alternative GATT legal policy that would require developing countries to accept roughly the same obligations as developed countries, the alternative sought by most critics. The impact on developing countries will be considered under each of the two contending economic assumptions in this area: that intervention policies are harmful and that they are helpful.

The chapter concludes that the GATT's current policy is harming developing countries more than it is helping them, even under the assumption that developing countries can be helped by infant-industry policies.