IRVINE : Human Rights Panel to Ask to Be Spared

The City Council tonight will discuss whether to abolish a 2-year-old committee that has written letters and made telephone calls on behalf of Irvine residents or workers who have family members trapped in Vietnam, China and other countries.

The Citizens Advisory Committee on International Affairs was added last month to a list of 19 committees and commissions that the council will consider eliminating to save money and reduce duplication. But members of the committee’s human rights and family reunification subcommittee said Monday that they will not go quietly.

“All we do is call the right people and say, ‘This is their case’ and make a personal appeal,” said James Acoba, an attorney and member of the subcommittee. Among other cases, the subcommittee helped reunite a UC Irvine doctoral student and his wife with their 3-year-old daughter, who was being held in China to help ensure the couple’s return, Acoba said.

Members are now working on about 10 cases, including freeing a teen-age Vietnamese girl from a Thailand refugee center. The girl was kidnaped by Thai pirates while fleeing Vietnam and traded as a sex slave for several months before escaping, said Sandy Larsen, an Irvine technical writer and five-year resident. An Irvine family has volunteered to adopt her, she said.

Members of the committee will speak before the council Tuesday evening and ask that the subcommittee be spared, Acoba said. People the subcommittee has helped also will speak on its behalf, he said.

Since City Council members have said they want to get rid of expensive and outdated committees, Acoba said, he wants the council to say whether they feel the $5,000 the committee costs each year is too expensive for the results it achieves.

“What is the value of having a UCI student’s daughter released?” Acoba said.

Acoba said he suspects that some council members might want to abolish the committee because it is “politically uncomfortable.”

Three of the five council members, including Mayor Sally Anne Sheridan, ran for office last year on a platform of focusing on city problems and not the national and international issues popular with former Mayor Larry Agran. Agran helped create the international affairs committee before Sheridan defeated him at the polls last June.

But Sheridan has been helpful to the committee and has often signed letters sent on behalf of people the committee was working to help, Acoba said.

The Human Rights and Family Reunification subcommittee plans to propose to the council that it become an independent committee, since it is the only active section of the international affairs committee, Larsen said. And instead of part-time help from the city staff, the new committee could be run more cheaply by using a student intern who could perform most of the work, she said.

After fighting for the committee’s life, committee members also plan to urge the council to boycott El Salvadoran coffee purchased for city functions, Acoba said. This is the committee’s first foray into an international political issue. When the issue first came up in November, some council members said they thought it was an inappropriate action for the city to take, but they agreed to consider the matter tonight.