China Releases US Human Rights Record in 2002

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, April 03, 2003

China Releases US Human Rights Record in 2002

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The Information Office of China's State Council published an article titled "The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2002" Thursday in response to the US State Department's " Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2002".

The article uses the latest evidences to show that the United States has been releasing annually Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, censuring other countries for their human rights situations, but it has turned a blind eye to the serious violations of human rights on its own soil.

The article comprises eight parts, namely Ineffective Protection of Life and Security of Person; Serious Human Rights Violation by Law Enforcement Officials; Money-driven Democracy; Poverty, Hunger and Homelessness; Women and Children are in Worrisome Situation; Deep-rooted Racial Discrimination; Blunt Violation of Human Rights in Other Countries; and Double Standards in International Field of Human Rights.

The article says that the US State Department released the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2002 on April 1.

Pretending to be "the world's judge of human rights," the United States once again assessed the human rights situations in over 190 countries and regions in the world. The country report on China presented a distorted picture of the human rights conditions in the country accompanied by groundless accusations.

But the country reports mention not even a word of the human rights problems in the United States itself. Therefore, it is necessary to make known to the world the human rights violations in the United States in 2002, the article says.

In American society, excessive violence has resulted in ineffective protection of life and security of the person.

According to a report released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Oct. 28, 2002, the United States recorded 11.8 million crime offenses including murder, rape, robbery and theft, in 2001, a 2.1 percent increase over 2000. Murder cases increased by 2.5 percent.

Crime in many major American cities went up in 2002. In Washington D.C., drug abuse, gang violence and prostitution ran rampant, and crimes went up by 36 percent from 2001; in Boston crimes increased by 67 percent, and in Los Angeles, by 27 percent.

The murder rate in the United States was five to seven times higher than most industrial nations.

In the United States, guns owned by private individuals exceed 200 million, averaging nearly one for every citizen. In 2002, the numbers of gun buyers across the United States went up by 13 percent to twice over previous years.

Excessive gun ownership has led to frequent shootings, and the number of victims of firearms-related crimes exceeded 30,000 a year.

From Oct. 2 to 22, 2002, serial gun shooting cases occurred in Washington D.C. and neighboring Maryland and Virginia states, in which ten people were killed and three others were seriously wounded.

Crime rates among juveniles in the United States have remained high, with youngsters accounting for 20 percent of violent crimes.Drug abuse among youngsters has kept increasing. Drug abuse among tenth-grade high school students in the United States went up from11.6 percent in 1991 to 22.7 percent in 2001.

In 2001, there were 638,000 narcotics-related cases, and drug abuse accounted for 25 percent of violent crimes in the United States.

The article goes on to say that the rights of ordinary Americans have met with challenge after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The anti-terrorism law USA Patriot Act, which took effect on Oct. 26, 2001, provides law enforcement agencies with greater powers for investigation, including wiretapping of phone calls and Internet E-mail communications by suspect terrorists.

It aroused great concern among the American public that the Department of Justice would encroach upon their right of privacy.

According to an investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in 2002 the number of monthly arrests increased by 15 percent over the previous year to 7,832. Prosecutors declined to charge in 24 percent of the cases.

In many cases torture was used to extract confessions, and unjust charges were often reported in the United States. According to a Reuters report on February 11, 2002, US authorities confirmed that over 200 inmates had been wrongly convicted since 1973; among them 99 inmates on death row had been proved innocent, but most of them had not got compensations.

According to an ABC (American Broadcasting Company) news report on March 15, 2002, every year thousands of criminals are convicted on the basis of confessions obtained from police interrogations.

The United States is one of the few countries to impose capital punishment on child offenders and mentally ill people in the world. Two thirds of the executions of child offenders over the past decade worldwide were carried out in the United States.

Prisons in the United States are jam-packed with inmates. According to a report of the Bureau of Justice Statistics under the Department of Justice released on Aug. 25, 2002, the adult US correctional population reached a record of 6.6 million at the end of 2001, or fourfold of the 1980 figure. Roughly 2 million Americans are currently behind bars, nearly 700 people per 100,000.It was called as "A stigma that never fades" by the British magazine Economist.

Poor management of prisons leads to the lack of protection of inmates' legitimate rights. Extortion, abuse, violence and sexual assault are serious in prisons of the United States.

According to reports of US human rights organizations, brutalities targeted at inmates number about 100,000 a year in American prisons. The prison and judicial departments remain indifferent towards such complaints and take no punishment measures.

Boasting itself to be the "model of democracy", the United States has been trying hard to sell its mode of democracy to the world, the article says. In fact, American "democracy" has always been democracy of the rich, a small number of the population.

According to an analysis made by the Associated Press based on data from the Federal Election Commission, in the 2002 midterm elections 95 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives and 75 percent of the seats in the Senate went to candidates who had spent the most in campaigning.

"Money politics" has made more and more American people lose interest in political participation.

The United States has been flaunting its "freedom of the press," but it met with criticism from many sides in 2002 in this respect. In its annual report published on May 2, 2002, Reporters Without Borders exposed that since Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has exerted pressure on the journalistic community in the war against terrorism, which has restricted freedom of the press.

The article points out that the United States is the only superpower in the world, however, the poor, hungry and homeless have formed a "Third World" in this most developed nation, owing to the widening gap in wealth between the rich and the poor and social injustice.

In the last two years, a series of scandals of major corporate fraud were exposed in the United States, resulting in a credibility crisis and financial losses, which has deprived ordinary Americans of a sense of economic security due to the serious losses they suffered.

The gap in wealth between rich and poor has become even wider. The US Federal Reserve reported on Jan. 22, 2003, that between 1998 and 2001, the gap in wealth between the 10 percent of families with the highest incomes and the 20 percent of families with the lowest incomes jumped by 70 percent. Poverty and hunger have kept increasing.

According to the American organization Bread for the World, 33 million Americans lived in households that experience hunger or the risk of hunger in 2002. The newspaper USA Today reported that the nation has estimated 3 million homeless.

The article says that women and children are in worrisome situation. Discrimination against women is common in the United States. American women are likely to become victims of crimes and violence.

A study report published by the Harvard School of Public Health on April 17, 2002 said that American females are at the highest risk of murder, and the US female homicide victimization rate is five times that of all the other high income countries combined.

American women are also likely to become victims of sexual assaults. In 2002, several scandals of sexual assaults on women by clergies were exposed. Agence France Presse (AFP) reported that about 40 percent of American Catholic nuns have been sexually abused, often at the hands of a priest or another nun.

American children often fall victim to domestic violence, social crimes, their parents' divorces, and abandonment. In 2002, a series of scandals of sexual assaults on children by Catholic clergies were exposed.

Many children have encountered serious difficulties in their life, medical treatment and education, and many of them have not received parental love and care. The New York Times reported last July that the proportion of American children who grow up in parentless families is increasing, from the previous 7.5 percent to the present 16.1 percent.

The article says that racial discrimination is deep-rooted in the United States. Racial discrimination is serious in law enforcement.

According to a study by the Justice Policy Institute of the United States, approximately one in every five blacks is jailed for some time during his life. The number of blacks in jail is greater than that of blacks at college.

Minorities are among the poorest groups in the United States. Minorities also suffer from unfair treatment in schooling. Blacks have enjoyed much poorer medical treatment than whites ever since they came to America from Africa. There is a life expectancy gap of about seven years between whites and African Americans.

Racial discrimination has been on the rise in the United States since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Discrimination against Muslims and Arabs is the most serious. According to statistics from the Islamic Society of North America, 48 percent of Muslims living in the Unites States said their lives have changed for the worse since Sept. 11.

The article emphasizes that the United States is following unilateralism in international affairs and has frequently committed blunt violation of human rights in other countries.

Regardless of the strong call for no war from the international community, the United States together with a few other countries, launched a war against Iraq on March 20, 2003. The war, which has openly violated the purpose and principle of the UN Charter, has caused casualties of innocent Iraqi civilians and serious humanitarian disasters.

During its air attacks against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2002, the US troops dropped nearly a quarter-million cluster bomblets and raided a number of non-military targets, causing heavy civilian casualties.

The rights and interests of prisoners of war (POWs) were also violated. According to CNN (Cable News Network), a total of 12,000Taliban fighters were reported to have been captured since the US launched its military action in Afghanistan, but only 3,500 to 4,000 of them survived.

Hundreds of thousands of US troops are stationed overseas, and such troops have committed crimes and human rights abuses wherever they stay. Each year US troops stationed in the Republic of Korea (ROK) are caught responsible for more than 400 traffic accidents, but only less than 10 cases would go for trial in ROK courts.

The US troops in Okinawa, Japan has long been notorious for its constant involvement in criminal cases such as arson and rape. Investigation shows that after World War II US soldiers have committed more than 300 sex crimes in Okinawa.

At the end, the article says that the United States has been releasing annually Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, censuring other countries for their human rights situations, but it has turned a blind eye to serious violations of human rights on its own soil.

This double standards on human rights issues cannot but meet with strong rejection and opposition worldwide, leaving the United States more and more isolated in the international community.

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