Figures and facts from US 2002 Human Rights Record

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

Figures and facts from US 2002 Human Rights Record

The Information Office of the State Council released Thursday a report entitled The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2002.

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The Information Office of the State Council released Thursday a report entitled The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2002.

Following are some figures and facts from the document:

Crime offenses in the United States numbered 11.8 million in 2001, a 2.1 percent increase over 2000. There was an offense in every 2.7 seconds on average, and there were 44 murders, 248 rapesand 26 hate crimes each day. Among the crime offenses were 15,980 murders and 90,491 forcible rapes.

In 2002, crime in many major American cities went up. In Washington D.C., crime went up by 36 percent from 2001; in Boston the crime rates increased by 67 percent, and in Los Angeles, by 27percent. 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. Excessive gunownership has led to frequent shootings, and victims of firearms-related crime number more than 30,000 a year.

Crime rates among juveniles in the United States have remained high, with youngsters accounting for 20 percent of violent crime.

In 2002 the number of monthly arrests increased by 15 percent over the previous year to 7,832. Prosecutors declined to charge in24 percent of the cases. Two-thirds of the cases they dropped weredropped on the day of arrest because they could not be proved in court (May 9, 2002, Sun).

US authorities confirmed that over 200 inmates had been wronglyconvicted since 1973; among them 99 inmates on death row had been proved innocent, but most of them had not got compensations.

The United States is one of the few countries to impose capitalpunishment 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. The adult US correctional population reached a record of almost 6.6 million at the end of 2001, or fourfold of the 1980 figure. One inevery 32 adult residents, were on probation or parole or were heldin a prison or jail.

American "democracy" has always been democracy of the rich.

During the midterm elections in 2002, spending on campaigning TV advertising amounted to 900 million US dollars, surpassing thatfor the presidential election in 2000. In the 2002 midterm elections 95 percent of 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.

Measured against the voting age population, turnout in presidential election years fell from its high of 62.8 percent in 1960 to an estimated 51.2 percent in 2000. In contrast, 60 percentof eligible voters shunned the midterm elections in 2002, leaving the voter turnout at 40 percent.

The gap in wealth between rich and poor has become even wider. Between 1992 and 1998, the gap in wealth between the 10 percent offamilies with the highest incomes and the 20 percent of families with the lowest incomes increased by nine percent, but between 1998 and 2001, the gap jumped by 70 percent.

Poverty and hunger have kept increasing. Thirty-three million American lived in households that experience hunger or the risk ofhunger in 2002. The current homelessness situation in the United States has become nearly as severe as at the end of World War II.

American women and children are likely to become victims of crimes and violence.

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.

In 2002, several scandals of sexual assaults on women by clergies were exposed. About 40 percent of American Catholic nuns (nearly 35,000) have been sexually abused, often at the hands of apriest or another nun.

Between 1988 and 1997, a total of 6,817 children, aged 5-14, were shot to death in the 50 states of the United States. In the country, 58,000 children were kidnapped by people other than their families each year, and 40 percent of them were slain in theend. Another 200,000 children were kidnapped by their family members, mostly for the right of custody.

In 2002, a series of scandals of sexual assaults on children by Catholic clergies were exposed. Some 80 priests have been accused of sexually abusing children, with one said to have assaulted morethan 100 children over the past 40 years.

Racial discrimination remains deep-rooted in the United States.

Blacks constitute only 12.9 percent of America's total population, but black prisoners account for 46 percent of the total in jail in the nation; approximately one in every five blacks is jailed for some time during the life. The number of blacks in jail is greater than that of blacks at college. In 2000,about 800,000 blacks were in jail, compared with only 600,000 blacks registered in institutions of higher learning.

Defendants who kill white people are significantly more likely to be charged with capital murder and sentenced to death than are killers of non-whites, and a black offender accused of killing a white victim is most likely to be put on death row.

Someone accused of killing a white person will be charged with capital murder is 1.6 times higher than the probability for a black-victim homicide. Blacks who kill whites are 2.5 times more likely to be sentenced to death than are whites who kill whites, and 3.5 times more likely than are blacks who kill blacks.

The poverty rate in the United States rose to 11.7 percent; the poverty rate was 22.7 percent among African Americans, and 21.4 percent among Hispanics, both nearly double the rate for other ethnic groups.

Blacks have enjoyed much poorer medical treatment than whites ever since they came to America from Africa.

Blacks have a cancer death rate about 35 percent higher than that of whites, the AIDS cases among black women and children are 75 percent higher than among white people. 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 September 11 terrorist attacks.

Forty-eight percent of Muslims living in the United States saidtheir lives have changed for the worse since Sept. 11. By the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, approximately60 percent of Muslims had experienced in person or witnessed acts of discrimination against Muslims including public harassment, physical assault and property damage. There had been nearly 2,000 vicious criminal cases against Muslims, including 11 murders and 56 death threats.

The United States pursues a policy of unilateralism and grossly violates human rights in other countries.

The ongoing war against Iraq, which was waged on March 20, 2003,by the United States together with a few of its partners, has resulted in large numbers of 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 killed more than 3,000 civilians in the country.

A total of 12,000 Taliban 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. Each year US troops stationed in the Republic of Korea (ROK) are caughtresponsible 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 itsconstant involvement in criminal cases such as arson and rape. After the World War II US soldiers have committed more than 300 sex crimes in Okinawa.

There are more than 52,000 illegitimate children in the Philippines fathered by US marines stationed in this Southeast Asian country before 1991.

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