Former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez and Attorney General Eric Holder (photo by Ryan J. Reilly / Main Justice).

Justice Department officials past and present celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act Friday, the same day as the Civil Rights Division announced it was considering new accessibility rules for movies, equipment and furniture, 911 services and websites.

Attorney General Eric Holder, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas E. Perez, former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Calif.) — the primary sponsor of the law — spoke at the ceremony.

Thornburgh recalled how when he was Attorney General in the early 1990s, the Justice Department planned to hold an event in the Great Hall to announce new ADA regulations. Shortly before the event they realized that the Great Hall itself wasn’t handicapped accessible, but engineers got to work and made it so in time for the event.

Since the passage of ADA, the Justice Department has  “had some problems in the courts,” which Thornburgh said came from judges with a “woeful lack of understanding about what it meant to have a disability.” He also urged state and local governments not to cutback on compliance with ADA regulations because of the recession.

Holder touted the work of the Justice Department on access for the disabled, saying that the department has returned to a model of aggressive enforcement actions.

“At every level of our work – and in cooperation with our partners across the administration – we have placed a renewed focus on enforcing the ADA,” Holder said in prepared remarks.

But the Justice Department had not done enough within its own house to offer work opportunities to those with disabilities, he said.

“Put bluntly, we do not have sufficient numbers of people with disabilities who serve as our colleagues in this great agency,” Holder said.

As part of the Justice Department’s Diversity Management Plan, Holder said, the new position of Special Assistant for Disability Resources would be filled in the coming weeks. The Attorney General’s Committee on the Employment of Persons with Disabilities is also making recommendations for improving the recruitment, retention and accomodation of persons with disabilities, he said.

Former Assistant Attorneys General for Civil Rights Stephen Pollack, John Dunne and Jim Turner attended the ceremony Friday, along with representatives from the disability rights movement.

The event came the same day as Justice Department officials announced new ADA regulations are in the works to address the accessibility of movies, equipment and furniture, 911 services and websites.

Being unable to access websites “puts individuals at a great disadvantage in today’s society, which is driven by a dynamic electronic marketplace and unprecedented access to information,” the department said in an advanced notices of proposed rulemaking.

Many websites “fail to incorporate or activate features that enable users with disabilities to access all the site’s information or elements. For instance, individuals who are deaf are unable to access information in Web videos and other multimedia presentations that do not have captions.”

Making websites friendly to disabled users is neither difficult nor especially costly, and often does not require changes to the format or appearance of a website, the DOJ said.

In another advanced notice of proposed rulemaking concerning video and movie captioning, the DOJ said representatives from the movie theater industry had strongly urged the government not to issue regulations regarding movie captioning at theaters, noting that new advances in digital cinema will make it much easier to provide closed captions or video described movies.

While the Justice Department is aware that costs associated with providing equipment “may indeed constitute an undue burden” on some movie theater owners and operators, the notice said the DOJ “believes that it may be unnecessary and inappropriate to wait to establish rules pertaining to closed captioning and video description for movies.”

The regulations are available here: ADA 1, ADA 2, ADA 3, and ADA 4

Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez at the National Press Club on Friday (photo by Ryan J. Reilly / Main Justice).

Appearing at the National Press Club on Friday, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez gave an impassioned speech on his vision for the Civil Rights Division, while criticizing its actions under the George W. Bush administration with the harshest language he has used to date.

“I learned, to my great disappointment, that those who had been entrusted with the keys to the division, and to its great power to pursue justice, treated the division instead like a buffet line at the cafeteria, cherryâ€�picking which laws to enforce,” Perez said in prepared remarks before the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.

“I’ve seen the eyes and the faces of the wonderful career professionals who toiled during the last eight years, who did their best and did so much, but it was so difficult,” said Perez during his speech.

“I must say I wasn’t surprised by much of the data  [showing fewer civil rights prosecutions in other areas during the Bush administration]. I rather expected it, but I was rather shocked in the hate crimes setting because Ed Meese made hate crimes a priority, Brad Reynolds made hate crimes a priority, John Dunne made hate crimes a priority, George Herbert Walker Bush made the prosecution of hate crimes a priority, Bill Clinton made the prosecution of hate crimes a priority, and Barack Obama and Eric Holder will once again make the prosecution of hate crimes a significant priority,” said Perez.

Touching on his theme of transformation and revitalization of the Civil Rights Division, Perez said that it  must recognize “emerging areas of interest, areas where the Civil Rights Division may not have played a large role historically, but must play a large role today. One essential area is the area of civil rights and human rights, recognizing that we must set an example for the world.”

Perez recounted his testimony before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary panel last week on how the Civil Rights Division saw its role in implementing several international human rights treaties. He said the division would be working closely with the State Department on international human rights issues to make sure that the U.S. is in compliance with those treaties.

“We are the nation’s problem-solvers, not simply the nation’s litigators,” said Perez. “I’m a firm believer that if you want a job done well, give it to a busy person, and we’re having a lot of busy people at our department,” said Perez.

The conclusion of Perez’s speech, filmed by Main Justice, can be viewed below. The full speech, as aired on C-SPAN, can be viewed here.

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