Editorial
OSCE Support for D.C. Voting Rights

DC Vote, an educational and advocacy organization dedicated to securing full voting representation in Congress for District residents, recently announced that with overwhelming support, the Third Committee of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Parliamentary Assembly passed a resolution that calls on the United States Congress to grant the residents of Washington, DC, equal voting rights in Congress in accordance with its OSCE human rights commitments.

The District of Columbia’s long-time fight to put an end to “taxation without representation” is significant on an international scale as the United States is the only country in the OSCE where residents of the nation's capital are denied full representation in the national legislature.

In her letter to the OSCE delegates, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) wrote that most people in other countries, like most Americans, are unaware of this human rights violation. "Armed with our provision in the Washington Declaration," she asked delegates to "become messengers to the world." She wrote: "This denial is so astonishing, particularly for a world power insisting on the spread of democracy worldwide, that when it becomes better known, it will fall."

Few Washingtonians understand the cause of the District’s fight for equal voting rights as the “origins of this denial are complex and the reasons for its survival for more than 200 years shift-parochial, partisan, and even racial-as causes for congressional inaction,” according to Norton.

As the global community begins to become more and more aware about this perceived human rights violation, it is incumbent upon Washingtonians to be amidst the voices now being heard for the first time for their very own rights.