"Human Rights Record Of The United States In 2001"
[FBIS Transcribed Text] Beijing, March 11 (XINHUA) -- Following is the
full text of the "Human Rights Record of the United States in 2001,"
published by the Information Office of the State Council of the People's
Republic of China Monday:
Human Rights Record of the United States in 2001
By Information Office of the State Council of the People's Republic
of China
On March 4, 2002, the US State Department published "Country Reports
on Human Rights Practices -- 2001." Once again the United States,
assuming the role of "world judge of human rights," has distorted human
rights conditions in many countries and regions in the world, including
China, and accused them of human rights violations, all the while turning
a blind eye to its own human rights-related problems. In fact, it is
right in the United States where serious human rights violations exist.
I. Lack of Safeguard for Life, Freedom and Personal Safety
Violence and crimes are a daily occurrence in the US society, where
people's life, freedom and personal safety are under serious threat.
According to the 2001 fourth issue of Dialogue published by the US
Embassy in China, in 1998, the number of criminal cases in the United
States reached 12.476 million, including 1.531 million violent crime
cases and 17,000 murder cases; and for every 100,000 people, there were
4,616 criminal cases, including 566 involving violent crimes. From 1977
to 1996, more than 400,000 Americans were murdered, almost seven times
the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. During the years
since 1997, another 480,000 people have been murdered in the country.
According to a report carried by the Christian Science Monitor in its
January 22, 2002 issue, the murder rate in the United States at present
stands at 5.5 persons per 100,000 people. According to data provided by
police stations in 18 major US cities, the number of murder cases in many
big cities in 2001 increased drastically, with those in Boston and
Phoenix City increasing the fastest. In the year to December 18, 2001,
the number of murder cases in the two cities increased by more than 60
percent over the same period of the previous year. The number of murder
cases increased by 22 percent in St. Louis, 17.5 percent in Houston, 15
percent in St. Antonio [as received], 11.6 percent in Atlanta, 9.2
percent in Los Angeles and 5.2 percent in Chicago. According to the
same report of the Christian Science Monitor, on campuses of colleges and
universities in the United States in 2001, the number of murder cases
increased by almost 100 percent over 2000, that of arson cases by about 9
percent, that of break-ins by 3 percent.
The United States is the country with the biggest number of private
guns. On the one hand, worries about the threat of violence have led to
rush buying of guns for self-protection; on the other hand, the flooding
of guns is an important factor contributing to high violence and crime
rates. Statistics of the FBI show that sales of weapons and ammunition
in the United States in the three months of September through November of
2001 grew anywhere from 9 percent to 22 percent. October witnessed a
record 1,029,691 guns registered. Statistics also show that shooting is
the second major cause of non-normal deaths after traffic accidents in
the United States, averaging 15,000 deaths annually. Over the history
of more than 200 years, three US presidents were shot, with two dead and
one wounded seriously. There is much less personal safety for common
people in the United States. Since 1972, more than 80 people have been
shot dead every day on average in the United States, including about 12
children.
On March 5, 2001, a 15-year-old student killed two and wounded 13
fellow students at Santana High School in California. This is the
deadliest school shooting following one in a high school in the state of
Colorado in April 1999, in which 13 were killed. Two days later, that
is, on March 7, a 14-year-old girl student shot dead a schoolmate of hers
in the cafeteria of a Roman Catholic school in Pennsylvania. On the
same day, police overpowered a gunman who was about to shoot on the
campus of the University of Albertus. On April 14, a 43-year-old man
with two rifles and two short guns fired madly at a bar and its car park,
killing two and wounding 20. On September 7, a gunman burst into a
family on the outskirts of Simi Valley of Los Angeles and shot three
people dead and wounded two. Earlier on August 31, a demobilized
policeman shot dead another and set fire on himself. FBI called Los
Angeles "the freest city for crimes." On December 7, a worker at a
woodworking factory shot one fellow worker dead and wounded six others in
Indiana.
On January 15, 2002, a teenage student fired at fellow students at
Martin Luther King High School, seriously wounding two. This coincided
with the 73rd anniversary of Martin Luther King, leader of the human
rights movement in the United States and an advocator of non-violence.
More ironically, on March 4, 2002, the very day when the US State
Department published its annual report, accusing other countries of
"human rights violations," another shooting took place: in New Mexico, a
four-year-old boy, while watching TV in his bedroom, shot dead an
18-month-old baby girl with his father's gun.
The US media are inundated with violent contents, contributing to a
high crime rate in the United States, especially among young people.
Young people in the country get used to violence and crimes from an early
age. With the extensive use of cable TV, video tapes and computers,
children have more opportunities to see bloody violent scenes. A
culture beautifying violence has made young people believe that the gun
can "solve" all problems. An investigative report issued on August 1,
2001 by a US non-governmental watchdog group -- Parents Television
Council (PTC) -- says that violence in television programs from 8 to 9
p.m. in the recent one-year period was up by 78 percent and abusive
language up by 71 percent. Even CBS, regarded as the " cleanest" TV
network, had 3.2 scenes of violence and abusive language per hour.
After the September 11 terrorist attacks, TV stations and movie houses in
the United States exercised some restraint on the broadcasting and
screening of programs and films of violence. But it was hardly two
months before violence films, which have top box-office value, staged a
comeback. International Herald Tribune reported that one American youth
could see 40,000 murder cases and 200,000 other violent acts from the
media before the age of 18. A survey by California-based Ethical Code
Institute shows that over the past year, most American youth had the
experience of using violence, including 21 percent of the boys in high
schools and 15 percent of the boys in junior middle schools who had the
experience of taking arms to school for at least once. The US National
Association of Education estimates that about 100,000 students in the
United States take arms to school every day.
In recent years, voices for controlling guns and eliminating the
culture of violence have been running high. On Mother's Day on May 14,
2000, women from nearly 70 cities in the United States staged a "Million
Moms Mother's Day March," demanding that the U.S. Congress enact a strict
gun control law. However, voices of the common people can hardly
produce any results.
II. Serious Rights Violations by Law Enforcement Departments
Police brutality and unfair adjudication are intrinsic stubborn
diseases of the United States. In March 2001, the family of a French
victim brought a lawsuit against the police and prison guards of the
state of Nevada. Nine prison guards were accused of beating the victim,
Phillippe Leman, to death. Forensic examinations identified the cause
of death as suffocation due to fracture of the throat bone. Yet, a
local court pardoned the nine prison guards and acquitted them of
responsibilities for the death of the French man.
Torture and forced confession are common in the United States, with
the number of convicts on the death row that are misjudged or wronged
remaining high. In December 2001, a man on the death row, Alon
Patterson, claimed that his confession was forced due to torture by
Chicago police, who used a plastic typewriter cover to suffocate him.
The case aroused extensive attention. As Chicago is under the
jurisdiction of Cook County, Chicago Herald Tribune sent reporters to
investigate the archives of several thousand murder cases in Cook since
1991. They found that verdicts were determined in at least 247 cases
without witness or evidence and that judgment was based on confessions of
the accused only. The credibility of such "confessions" is subject to
doubt.
US federal laws and 38 states allow the death penalty. Since the
1990s, crimes punishable by death and the annual number of executions in
the United States have been on the increase. Annual executions
increased from 23 in 1990 to 98 in 1999. In the last 20 years, the
United States has extended the death penalty to more than 60 crimes and
speeded up executions by restricting the right of the convicted to
appeal. Since 1976 when the US Supreme Court restored the death
penalty, about 600 persons have been executed in the United States.
According to a February 11, 2002 Reuters report, from 1973 to 1995, the
verdicts of 68 percent of convicts on the death row were overturned owing
to misjudgment by the court. In the cases with overturned verdicts, 82
percent of the convicts were sentenced to lesser penalties and 9 percent
were set free. Since 1973, a total of 99 convicts on the death row have
been proven innocent. These people spent an average of eight years of
terror in death confines, sustaining tremendous mental trauma.
According to an analysis, main reasons for misjudgment were failure to
get legal counsel on the part of the accused, confession forcing by the
police and prosecutors, and misdirection of the jury by judges.
The United States has the biggest prison population in the world.
Prisons there are overcrowded, and inmates ill-treated. A study by the
Judicial Policy Institute under the Juvenile and Criminal Hearing Center
shows that during the 1992-2000 period, 673,000 people were sent to state
or federal prisons and detention centers, and 476 out of every 100,000
people were detained. With prisons burdened with too many inmates,
violent conflicts keep occurring. In December 2001, about 300 inmates
in a California prison staged a riot, which was put down by prison
guards, using tear gas and wooden bullets. Seven prisoners were
seriously wounded. The prison in question incarcerated more than 4,000
inmates though it was designed to keep no more than 2,200. Overcrowding
often leads to violent clashes among prisoners. In 2000 alone, more
than 120 prisoners staged riots, in which ten people were wounded. Drug
taking is prevalent in US prisons. In the last ten years, at least 188
inmates died of drug abuse.
Punishment for sex offenders in the United States has become more and
more severe. Many phased-out cruel punishments have been reinstated.
Some criminals would select the extreme penalty of castration in exchange
for a penalty reduction. Castration had been removed as a penalty
scores of years before. According to the Los Angeles Times, in
California in the last three years, two sex offenders received castration
in return for release.
In February 2002, the world was shocked to learn of a scandal
involving a crematorium in the United States. Tri-State Crematory in
the state of Georgia, instead of cremating human bodies after receiving
money for the service, threw the corpses in the woods or stacked them in
wooden sheds like cordwood, leaving them to rot there. The shocking
practice is said to have lasted 15 years. More than 300 bodies have
been found on the grounds of the crematorium so far. The crime is
shocking enough, but the state of Georgia does not have a law that is
applicable for the crime. What verdict to pass on the suspect remains a
legal difficulty.
III. Plight of the Poor, Hungry and Homeless
While the best-developed country in the world, the United States
confronts a serious problem of polarization between the rich and the
poor. Never has a fundamental change been possible in conditions of the
poor, who constitute the forgotten "third world" within this superpower.
The gap between high-income and low-income families in terms of the
wealth owned by either group has further widened over the past two
decades. In 1979, the average income of the families with the highest
incomes, who account for 5 percent of the total in the United States, was
about ten times as great as that of the families with the lowest incomes,
who account for 20 percent of the total. By 1999, the figure had grown
to 19 times. According to a New York Times analysis of a US Census
Bureau survey in August 2001, the economic boom the United States
experienced in the 1990s failed to make the American middle class richer
than in the previous decade. The true fact is that the poor became even
poorer and the rich, even wealthier. For most of those in between the
two opposite groups, life was worse at the end of the 1990s than at the
beginning of the decade. Right now, the richest 1 percent of the
Americans own 40 percent of the national wealth. In contrast, the share
is a mere 16 percent for 80 percent of the American population. The
richest 20 percent of the families in Washington D. C. are 24 times as
rich as the poorest 20 percent, up from 18 times a decade ago.
Problems facing the poor, hungry and homeless have become
increasingly conspicuous. According to a 2002 report of the American
Food Research and Action Center on its website, 10 percent of the
American families, in other words 19 million adults and 12 million
children, suffered from food insecurity in 1999. In a national survey
of emergency feeding program (Hunger in America 2001), America's Second
Harvest emergency food providers served 23 million people in the year, 9
percent more than in 1997. The figure included nine million children.
Nearly two-thirds of the adult emergency food recipients were women, and
more than one in five were elderly.
In its annual report published in December 2001, the United States
Conference of Mayors reported a sharp increase in the number of the
hungry and homeless in major cities. In the 27 cities covered by a USCM
survey, the number of people asking for emergency food increased by an
average of 23 percent, and the increase averaged 13 percent for those
asking for emergency housing relief. Demand for emergency food supplies
grew in 93 percent of the cities covered by the survey. Of those who
asked for emergency food, many -- 19 percent more than in the previous
year -- had children to support. Of the adults who asked for emergency
relief, 37 percent were employed. Hunger in these cities was attributed
to low incomes, unemployment, high housing rent, economic recession,
welfare reforms, high medical bills and mental disorders. According to
a report issued by the US Department of Labor on November 29, 2001, 4.02
million Americans -- the highest number in 19 years -- were living on
relief. The National Alliance to End Homelessness has reported that
750,000 Americans are in a permanent state of homelessness, and that up
to two million have had experiences of having no shelter for themselves.
People without a roof over themselves have to spend the night in places
like street corners, abandoned cars, refuges and parks, where their
personal safety cannot be guaranteed.
Lives of the rich seem more valued than lives of the poor.
According to la Liberation on January 9, 2002, the federal fund set up by
the American government would compensate victims of the September 11,
2001 attacks according to their ages, salaries and the number of people
in their families, plus a sum in compensation for the mental trauma the
family members suffered. This way of fixing the compensations produced
shocking results. If a housewife was killed, her husband and two
children would be entitled to 500,000 US dollars in compensation from the
fund. If the victim happened to be a Wall Street broker, the
compensation would be as much as 4.3 million US dollars for his widow and
two children. Families of many victims protested against this
inequality, compelling the American government to commit itself to
revising the method.
IV. Worrying Conditions for Women and Children
Gender discrimination is an important aspect of social inequality in
the United States. Until this day, there has been no constitutional
provision on equality between men and women. On September 18, 2000,
with support of some NGOs, a dozen surviving " comfort women" brought a
class action with a federal court in Washington D.C., demanding public
apology and compensation from the Japanese government. The US
government, however, issued a statement of interest in July 2001, calling
for dismissal of the lawsuit on the ground that recruiting of "comfort
women" by the Japanese army during the Second World War was a "sovereign
act." The statement aroused protects from the US National Organization
for Women, the Truth Council for World War II in Asia and other NGOs.
This incident, in its own way, reflects current conditions in protection
of women's human rights in the United States and America's official
attitude towards women's rights demand.
Violence against women is a serious social problem in the United
States. According to US official statistics, one American woman is
beaten in every 15 seconds on average and some 700,000 cases of rape
occur every year. According to the 121st edition of the American Census
published on January 24, 2002, in 1998 about one million people were
suspected of involvement in violence between spouses and between men and
women as friends. In March 2001, Amnesty International USA issued a
report after two years' investigation, saying that the human rights of
female prison inmates in the United States are often fringed upon and
that they often fall victim to sexual harassment or rape by prison
guards. Seven states even do not have laws or legal provisions banning
sexual relations between prison officials and female inmates.
Protection of American children's rights is far from being adequate.
The United States is one of the only two countries that have not acceded
to Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is one of the only five
countries that execute juvenile offenders in violation of relevant
international conventions. More juvenile offenders are executed in the
United States than in any of the other four. In 25 states, the youngest
age eligible for death sentence is set at 17; and 21 states set that age
at 16 or do not impose an age limit at all. Besides, the United States
is among the few countries where psychiatric and mentally retarded
offenders could be executed. According to the Human Rights Watch, in
the 1990s, nine juveniles were sentenced to death in the United States,
and the number was greater than that reported by any of the other
countries.
American children are susceptible to violence and poverty.
According to a report published on November 28, 2001 by the US Violent
Policy Center, analysis of the murder data released by FBI shows that
from 1995 to 1999, 3,971 infants and juveniles aged one to 17 years were
murdered in handgun homicides. The firearm homicide rate for American
children was 16 times the figure for children in 25 other industrialized
countries. Black children have the highest rate of handgun homicide
victimization, seven times higher than that for white children. In
April 2000, the US Fund for the Protection of the Child published a green
paper on conditions of American children. It quotes the poverty
statistics of the American government for 1999 as saying that more than
12 million children were living below the poverty line set by the federal
government, accounting for one-sixth of the total number of children in
the country. A report by the US Health and Public Service Department
released at the beginning of 2001 says that 10 percent of the American
children have mental health problems and that one out of every ten
children and children in adolescence suffered from mental illnesses that
are serious enough to hurt. Nevertheless, those able to receive
treatment could not exceed one- fifth.
The problem of missing children is serious. Figures published by
FBI in 2001 showed that in 1999, 750,000 children went missing,
accounting for 90 percent of the total number of people who went missing
in the year. To put it another way, an average of 2,100 children at 17
or younger went missing every day. Since the Missing Children Act was
enacted in 1982, the number of children registered by police as missing
has increased by 468 percent.
American children often fall prey to sexual abuse. According to a
report published in September 2001 by a group of researchers at the
University of Pennsylvania after three years' investigation, about
400,000 American children are streetwalkers or engage in various obscene
activities for money near their schools. Children who have fled their
homes or are homeless suffer most severely from sexual abuse. Sexual
harassment against children by clergymen in the United States is serious.
According to Newsweek published on February 26, 2002, the Boston
archdiocese of the US Roman Catholic Church has over the past decade paid
1 billion US dollars in compensation in lawsuits of sexual harassment by
its clergymen against children. About 80 Boston clergymen are suspected
of having molested children sexually. One has been accused of sexually
molested more than 100 children. This, the greatest scandal in the
United States following the Enron case, has aroused nationwide attention
to the problem that is also common among clergymen elsewhere and, as a
result, a string of similar cases have been brought to light.
V. Deep-Rooted Racial Discrimination
Racial discrimination is the most serious human rights problem in the
United States, a problem that the United States has never resolved since
its founding. The United States, as a matter of fact, was notorious for
genocide against aboriginal Indians, trade of African blacks and black
slavery. In recent years, scandals of racial discrimination have
occurred, one after another.
On April 7, 2001, a white police officer shot to death an unarmed
black youth in Cincinnati, Ohio, as he was trying to run away after
breaking traffic rules. Black people in the city staged mass protests
following the death of Timothy Thomas, which culminated in a racial
conflict. The incident once again aroused worldwide attention to the
problem of racial discrimination in the United States. According to the
Observer of Britain published on April 15, 2001, Cincinnati is one of the
eight large cities in the United States where the problem of racial
discrimination is most serious. Even though the world is already in the
21st century, racial segregation is still practiced by virtually all
schools in the city. Timothy Thomas was the fourth black person killed
by white police in succession from November 2000 to April 2001, and the
15th black suspect killed by white police in the same city since 1995.
It is beyond people's comprehension that during the same period, killing
of white suspects by the police never occurred. According to the
Associated Press, the mass protests in Cincinnati matched those that
broke out after the killing of Martin Luther King.
Racial discrimination is discernible everywhere in the United States.
The proportion of federal government posts taken by ethnic minority
Americans is much smaller than the proportion of their population in the
national total. According to an article in the July-August issue of the
bimonthly World Economic Review, of the 535 senators and Congress men and
women, those of Latin-American origin with voting rights number only 19,
or 3.5 percent of the total, even though ethnic Latin-Americans account
for 12.5 percent of the country's total population. Blacks account for
13 percent of the American population, but are able to win only 5 percent
of the public posts through election. There are legal provisions to the
effect that colored people must account for a certain percentage in the
police force. The true fact, however, is that few black people are able
to join the police force and even fewer serve as senior police officers.
Take for example Cincinnati. Black people account for 43 percent of
the local population but, of the 1,000 members of the local police force,
only 250 are blacks. None of the CEOs and presidents of the top 500
companies in the Unites States are blacks. Blacks holding senior posts
at Wall Street investment companies are rare, if any.
Social conditions are bad for ethnic minority Americans. According
to the 2000 population census, blacks unable to enjoy medical insurance
are twice as many as whites. Only 17 percent of the black population
are able to finish higher education, in contrast to 28 percent for
whites. The unemployment rate was twice as high for blacks as for
whites. Meanwhile, blacks employed for menial service jobs are more
than twice as many. Incomes for the average white family averaged
44,366 US dollars in 1999. For an average black family, however, the
figure was 25,000 US dollars. According to statistics provided by the US
Equal Employment Opportunity Committee, the number of employed ethnic
minority Americans has increased by 36 percent since 1990, but the number
of charges against racial or ethnical harassment at work-sites has
doubled, averaging 9,000 a year. Of the five largest dumps of harmful
wastes, three are in residential areas inhabited mainly by blacks and
other ethnic minority Americans. Up to 60 percent of the blacks and
ethnic Latin-Americans are living in places where harmful wastes are
dumped.
Racial discrimination is frequently seen in America's judicature.
Half of the 2 million prison inmates are blacks, and ethnic
Latin-Americans account for 16 percent of the total. According to an
investigative report published by the United Nations, for the same crime
the penalty meted out against the colored can be twice or even thrice as
severe as against the white. Blacks sentenced to death for killing whites
are four times as many as whites given death penalty for killing blacks.
The US Department of Justice reported on March 12, 2001 that threats by
the police with force against blacks and ethnic Latin-Americans are twice
as possible as against whites.
VI. Wantonly Infringing upon Human Rights of Other Countries
The United States ranks first in the world in terms of military
spending and arms export. Its military expenditure accounts for nearly
40 percent of the world total, more than the combined military
expenditure of the nine countries ranking next to it. Its arms exports
account for 36 percent of the world total. US defense budget for the
2003 fiscal year announced by the US Defense Department on February 4,
2002 totaled 379 billion US dollars, up 48 billion US dollars, or 15
percent, over the previous year and representing the highest growth rate
in the past two decades.
The United States ranks first in the world in wantonly infringing
upon the sovereignty of, and human rights in, other countries. Since
the 1990s, the United States has used force overseas on more than 40
occasions. On April 1, 2001, a US military reconnaissance plane flew
above waters off China's coast in violation of flight rules, causing the
crash of a Chinese aircraft and the death of its pilot. It
presumptuously entered China's territorial airspace without permission
from the Chinese side and landed on a Chinese military airfield,
seriously encroaching upon China's sovereignty and human rights. After
the incident, the United States made all sorts of excuses to defend
itself, refusing to make a public apology for the serious consequences of
its intruding aircraft and trying to shirk its responsibilities. This
aroused great indignation and strong protests from the Chinese people.
The United States has built many military bases all over the world,
where it has stationed hundreds of thousands of troops, violating human
rights everywhere in the world. Before the September 11 incident, the
United States had stationed its troops in more than 140 countries.
Today, the United States has expanded its so-called security interests to
almost every corner of the world. In recent years, US troops stationed
in Japan have frequently committed crimes. In 1995, three American
soldiers raped a Japanese schoolgirl in Okinawa, sparking massive
protests by the Japanese people and arousing the alert of world public
opinion. In fact, scandals like this happen almost every year. On
January 11, 2001, an American soldier was arrested for molesting a local
schoolgirl in Okinawa. On January 19, the Okinawa parliament adopted a
resolution of protest against frequent criminal activities by American
soldiers, calling for reduction of US troops in Japan. However, in an
e-mail message to his subordinates, the US commander in Okinawa insulted
the Okinawa magistrate and parliament. On June 29, another soldier of
the US air force sexually assaulted a Japanese girl in Kyatan of Okinawa.
The NATO headed by the United States dropped a large number of
depleted uranium bombs during the Kosovo war, subjecting peace- keeping
soldiers as well as the local people to serious danger. The US side
claimed that one of the reasons for the withdrawal of US troops from
Kosovo is that "it would not let radiation hurt our boys." Latest reports
say that the United States knew the dangers of depleted uranium bombs and
where they were dropped, and that, when dividing up peacekeeping zones,
it allocated the most seriously contaminated areas to allied forces.
After the US army entered Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, it gave a boost
to the sex industry in the two places. Over the past year,
Bosnia-Herzegovina uncovered dozens of women trafficking cases, many of
which were associated with the US army. Most of the US soldiers were
involved in prostitution and some of them were even involved in selling
women. In September 2000, the US Army published a report of more than
600 pages, detailing all kinds of bad behaviors committed by the No.82
air-borne division of its First Army during their peace-keeping mission
in Kosovo, admitting that the general atmosphere of the US army in Kosovo
is very inhumane.
Available data indicate that in the Gulf War the United States
dropped more than 940,000 depleted uranium bombs with a total weight of
320 tons onto Iraqi land, causing serious destruction to the environment
of Iraq and the health of its people. The Ministry of Health of Iraq
pointed out in a report that the number of cancer patients in Iraq
increased dramatically after the Gulf War, from 6,555 in 1989 and 4,341
in 1991 to 10,931 in 1997. In the ten years since the end of the Gulf
War, the incidence rate of leukemia, malicious tumors and other difficult
and complicated cases in areas hit by depleted uranium bombs in southern
Iraq was 3.6 times higher than the national average and the proportion of
women with miscarriage was ten times as high as in the past. On
February 22, 2002, Emad Sa'doon, a medical expert with Basra University
in southern Iraq, disclosed to the media that after many years of
research the medical group led by him found that in the 1989-1999 period,
the number of patients with blood cancer doubled and the number of women
with breast cancer increased 102 percent.
The United States always flaunts the banner of "freedom of the
press". Yet according to an Agence France-Presse report on February 21,
2002, the annual report of International Journalism Institute published
on the same day pointed out that the way in which the US government dealt
with the media during the Afghan War and its attempt at suppressing
freedom of speech by independent media were "the most amazing in 2001."
In the United States, close to 100 companies manufacture and export
considerable quantities of instruments of torture that are banned in
international trade. They have set up sales networks overseas. In its
February 26, 2001 report, Amnesty International said some 80 American
companies were involved in the manufacture, marketing and export of
instruments of torture, including electric- shock tools, shackles and
handcuffs with saw-teeth. Many instruments of torture and police tools
are high-tech products, which can cause serious harms to the human body.
For instance, handcuffs,which would tear apart the flesh of the tortured
if the victim slightly exerts himself, are very cruel, and so is a high-
pressure rope for tying up a person. Although categorically prohibited
by US law, the Commerce Department of the United States has given
official export licenses for exporting such tools. According to
statistics, American companies have secured export licenses and sold
tools of torture overseas valued at 97 million U. S. dollars since 1997
under the category of "crime control equipment." It is inconceivable
that, while the US State Department is talking about human rights, the US
Department of Commerce has given export licenses for products determined
as instruments of torture in statutes of the US government, said Dr.
William Schulz, who conducted the investigation.
The United States has also conducted irradiation experiments with the
dead bodies of babies from overseas. The Daily Telegraph and the
Observer of the United Kingdom disclosed in June of 2001 that the United
States has recently declassified some top-secret documents, which
indicate that in the 1950s the United States carried out what was called
"Project Sunshine" experiments. For these experiments, about 6,000 dead
babies were obtained from overseas and cremated without permission of
their parents. The ashes were sent to laboratories for irradiation
studies.
The US government has until this day refused to sign the Basel
Convention, which restricts the transfer of waste materials. It often
transfers dangerous waste materials by different methods to developing
countries, damaging the health of the people of other countries. The
Associated Press reported on February 25, 2002 that, according to an
estimate by environmental protection organizations, as much as 50 percent
to 80 percent of the electronic wastes collected by the United States in
the name of recycling have been shipped to a number of countries in Asia
for waste treatment, causing serious environmental and health problems to
the local people.
The United States has announced its withdrawal from the Kyoto
Protocol, refusing to bear the responsibilities of improving the
environment for human survival and bringing about negative impacts on
environmental protection efforts in the world.
The Third UN Conference Against Racism held in Durban of South
African in September 2001 was an important gathering in the area of
international human rights at the beginning of the new century. It
attracted representatives from more than 190 countries, which reflected
the burning desire of the international community to eliminate hatred
accumulated over time and eradicate the remnants of racism through
dialogue and cooperation. The United States, however, turned a deaf ear
to the voices of the international community. Ignoring its
international obligations, it asserted openly to boycott the conference
before it was opened. Although the United States sent a low-level
delegation to the conference as a result of prompting and persuasion by
the United Nations, it took the lead in opposing discussing slave trade
and colonial compensation, expressed opposition to putting Zionism on a
par with racism, and walked out of the conference midway. Behaviors of
the United States at the conference revealed its hypocrisy when it
professes itself as "a world judge of human rights" and show how arrogant
and isolated the hegemonic acts of the US government are.
For many years, the US government has year after year published
reports on human rights conditions in other countries in disregard of the
opposition of many countries in the world, cooking up charges, twisting
facts and censoring all countries except itself. It also publishes a
report every year to make a so- called appraisal of anti-drug trafficking
campaigns of 24 countries including all Latin American countries. The
United States deals with any country it deems "inefficient in cracking
down on drug trafficking" with condemnation, sanctions, interference in
the latter's internal affairs, or outright invasion.
In 2001, without support from the majority of member countries, the
United States was voted out of the United Nations Human Rights Commission
and the International Narcotics Committee. This shows, from one aspect,
that it is extremely unpopular for the United States to push double
standards and unilateralism on such issues as human rights, crackdowns on
drug trafficking, arms control and environmental protection. We urge
the United States to change its ways, give up its hegemonic practice of
creating confrontation and interfering in the internal affairs of others
by exploiting the human rights issue, go with the tide of the times
characterized by cooperation and dialogue in the area of human rights,
and do more useful things for the progress and development of the human
society.
[Description of Source: Beijing Xinhua in English -- China's official
news service for English-language audiences (New China News Agency)]
