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Shall we issue the US Human rights report! (Part I)
Shall we issue the US Human rights report! (Part I)
8/1/16
Recent years, the United States and some US-led
organizations on human rights, such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty
International, Freedom House…etc, have issued human rights reports on other
countries, including Vietnam. But, they seem to forget about theirs, about many
human rights violated cases. So, it’s now time we should remind them that!
In theory, human rights in the United States comprise a series of rights which are
legally protected by the Constitution of the United States,
including the amendments, state constitutions, conferred
by treaty, and enacted legislatively through Congress, state legislatures, and
state referenda and citizen's initiatives.
However,
the human rights record of the United States of America is a complicated
matter. Some observers give the U.S. high to fair marks on human rights while
others charge it with a persistent pattern of human rights violations. Here, I just lay out an overview of Human
rights in the United States on my own research and position:
Contrary
to its constitutionally-protected requirement towards respecting of human
rights, the United States, a self-proclaimed human rights defender, has been internationally
criticized for its violation of human rights, including the denial of
access to basic healthcare, the least protections for workers of any
Western country, the imprisonment of debtors, the disconnection of
water to impoverished citizens who cannot afford it, the deprivation of housing
and the criminalization of homelessness,
the invasion of the privacy of its citizens through surveillance programs, institutional racism, gender discrimination, police brutality, the incarceration of citizens for profit,
the mistreatment of prisoners and juveniles in the prison system,
crackdowns on
peaceful protesters, the continued support for foreign dictators
who commit abuses (including genocide) against their own people,
unconstitutional denial of voting rights of
certain races or political affiliations, and the illegal detainment and torture
of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
Freedom of expression and peaceful protest
Some US laws of limit on expression
remain controversial due to concerns that they infringe on freedom of
expression. These include the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.
Approximately 30,000 government employees and contractors are currently
employed to monitor telephone calls and other communications.
In November 2013, leaked documents
revealed that the government and some large corporations had censored many
blogs and news articles using existing surveillance programs.
Although Americans are supposed to
enjoy the freedom to peacefully protest, protesters are sometimes arrested, beaten,
mistreated, jailed or fired upon. Some following cases will prove that.
In June 2009, the ACLU asked the
Department of Defense to stop categorizing political protests as
"low-level terrorism" in their training courses.
On February 19, 2011, Ray McGovern was
dragged out of a speech by Hillary Clinton on Internet freedom, in which she
said that people should be free to protest without fear of violence. McGovern,
who was wearing a Veterans for Peace T-shirt, stood up during the
speech and silently turned his back on Clinton.
He was then assaulted by undercover and uniformed police, roughed up,
handcuffed and jailed. He suffered bruises and lacerations in the attack and
required medical treatment.
During the fall of 2011, large numbers
of protesters taking part in the "Occupy
movement" in cities around the country were arrested on various
charges during protests for economic and political reforms.
American
police arrested about 200 peaceful students protesting against the Keystone XL
oil pipeline based on tar sands in March 2014. The marchers chanted
"climate justice now" with signs as "don't tarnish the
Earth". What’s wrong with that?
We can see the USA PATRIOT
Act violating this freedom, saying it has encroached upon rights and
freedom of citizens, especially that the freedom of
press has been neglected, citing examples such as the firing of Peter Arnett
and limited access to al Jazeera television broadcasts.
Discrimination
and Abuse
The U.S. is a country with grim
problems of racial discrimination, and institutional discrimination against
ethnic minorities continued.
Serious racial bias persisted in the
police and justice systems. Minority groups and indigenous people are subject
to unfairness in environment, election, health care, housing, education and
other fields, it says. In August 2014, the United Nations Committee on the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination, in its concluding observation on the
periodic report of the U.S. on the latter's implementation of relevant
convention, slammed the U.S. for violating the rights of ethnic minorities,
indigenous people, immigrants and other minority groups.
Members of racial and ethnic minorities
continue to be disproportionately arrested, incarcerated and subjected to
harsher sentences.
American women and children's rights
were not fully protected. Women were discriminated at workplaces, and domestic
violence was prevalent. Each year, 2.1 million American women on average were
assaulted by men. Three females were murdered by their partner each day, and
four females died each day as a result of abuse. In the U.S. military, reports
of female soldiers getting harassed were on the rise, and more faced
repercussions for reporting assaults.
The U.S. was haunted by spreading guns,
frequent occurrence of violent crimes, which threatened citizens' civil rights.
Three children died each day as a result of abuse. School violence and sex
assaults were pervasive and gun shootings happened from time to time.
The excessive use of force by police
officers led to many deaths, sparking public outcry. An unarmed 18-year-old
African-American Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer named
Darren Wilson in Ferguson, a town in Missouri. After the grand jury of both
Missouri and New York decided to bring no charges against the white police
officer, massive protests broke out in more than 170 cities nationwide.
Amnesty International reported those who
kill whites are more likely to be executed than those who kill blacks, citing
that of the 845 people executed since 1977 80 percent were put to death for
killing whites and 13 percent were executed for killing blacks, even though
blacks and whites are murdered in almost equal numbers.
Judicial and Prison system
The U.S.
penal system is implemented on the federal, and in particular on the state and
local levels. This social policy has resulted in a high rate of incarceration,
which affects Americans from the lowest socio-economic backgrounds
and racial minorities the
hardest. Some have criticized the United States for having an extremely large prison population,
where there have been reported abuses. The United States had the highest percentage of people in
prison of any nation. There were more than 2.2 million in prisons or
jails, or 737 per 100,000 population, or roughly 1 out of every 136 Americans.
According to The National Council on Crime and Delinquency, since 1990 the
incarceration of youth in adult jails has increased 208%.
Even,
Human Rights Watch raised concerns with prisoner rape
and medical care
for inmates. In a survey of 1,788 male inmates in Midwestern prisons
by Prison
Journal, about 21% claimed they had been coerced or pressured into
sexual activity during their incarceration and 7% claimed that they had been
raped in their current facility. Tolerance of serious sexual abuse
and rape in United States prisons
are consistently reported as widespread. It has been fought against by
organizations such as Stop Prisoner Rape.
The
United States is the only country in the world allowing sentencing of young adolescents to
life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. There are
currently 73 Americans serving such sentences for crimes they committed at the
age of 13 or 14. In December 2006 the United
Nations took up a resolution calling for the abolition of this kind
of punishment for children and young teenagers. 185 countries voted for the
resolution and only the United States against. (to be continued)
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All comments [ 11 ]
The United States, a self-proclaimed human rights defender, has been internationally criticized for its violation of human rights, especially to black people.
Apparently, in the areas of criminal justice, immigration, and national security, US laws and practices routinely violate rights.
Yes, they interfere with our country's internal affairs, so do we need!
The August 2014 police killing of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent police crackdown on protesters, underscored the gulf between respect for equal rights and law enforcement’s treatment of racial minorities.
US national security policies, including mass surveillance programs, are eroding freedoms of the press, expression, and association.
Racial disparities have long plagued the US criminal justice system. African American men are incarcerated at six times the rate of white men, and three percent of all black males are currently incarcerated in a state or federal prison.
Many poor defendants across the country languish in pretrial detention in large part because they cannot afford to post rising bail costs.
Hundreds of thousands of children work on US farms. Child farmworkers often work 10 or more hours a day and risk pesticide exposure, heat illness, and injuries.
So, now we can see who violated more human rights than.
One in five women is sexually assaulted in college. Meanwhile, survivors from colleges across the country continued to expose how schools and local police mishandled their cases.
For the 13th year, the US detained men at Guantanamo Bay without charge or trial; at time of writing, 143 detainees remained at the facility.
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