The Information Office of the State Council issued
Monday a report on US human rights record in 2001, pointing out that
serious human rights violations exist in the US.
The article, entitled "Human Rights Record of the United
States in 2001", contains lots of facts and figures to show
America's own human rights-related problems.
The article urges the United States to 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.
The about 10,000-Chinese-word article consists of six parts, namely
"Lack of Safeguard for Life, Freedom and Personal Safety",
"Serious Rights Violations by Law Enforcement Departments",
"Plight of the Poor, Hungry and Homeless", "Worrying
Conditions for Women and Children", "Deep-Rooted Racial
Discrimination", and "Wantonly Infringing upon Human Rights of
Other Countries".
The article comes after the U.S. State Department published
"Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2001" on March 4,
2002.
The article notes that 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," says the article.
Violence and crimes are a daily occurrence in the US society, where
people's life, freedom and personal safety are under serious threat,
says the article.
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.
Data provided by police in 18 major cities of the US show that the
number of murder cases in many big cities in 2001 increased drastically,
with those in Boston and Phoenix City increasing by more than 60 percent
over the same period of the previous year.
The United States is the country with the biggest number of private guns.
"On one hand, worries about the threat of violence have led to rush
buying of guns for self-protection," says the article, "on the
other hand, the flooding guns is an important factor contributing to
high violence and crime rates."
Statistics show that shooting is the second major cause of non-normal
deaths after traffic accidents in the United States, averaging 15,000
deaths annually.
The US media are inundated with violent contents, contributing to a high
crime rate in the United States, especially among young people.
International Herald Tribute 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 culture beautifying violence has made young people believe that
the gun can 'solve' all problems," says the article. The US
National Association of Education estimates that around 100,000 students
in the United States take arms to school every day.
The article notes that police brutality and unfair adjudication are
intrinsic stubborn diseases of the United States. 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.
According to a February 11, 2002 Reuters report, the verdicts of 68
percent of convicts on the death row were overturned owing to
misjudgment by the court in the US from 1973 to 1995. A total of 99
convicts on the death row have been proven innocent in the US since
1973. 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.
As the best-developed country in the world, the United States, however,
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, says the article.
Right now the richest one 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.
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.
The American government set up a federal fund to compensate victims of
the September 11, 2001 attacks according to their ages, salaries and the
number of people in their families, plus a sum incompensation for the
mental trauma the family members suffered. But this way of fixing the
compensations produced a shocking result: lives of the rich are more
valued than lives of the poor.
Families of many victims protested against this inequality, compelling
the government to commit itself to revising the method.
Gender discrimination is an important aspect of social inequality in the
United States, says the article. Up to date there has been no
constitutional provision on equality between men and women in the United
States.
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, says the article.
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.
The US 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. Besides, the United States is among the few countries where
psychiatric and mentally retarded offenders could be executed.
American children are susceptible to violence and poverty, says the
article. The firearm homicide rate for American children was 16 times
the figure for children in 25 other industrialized countries.
More than 12 million children were living below the poverty line set by
the federal government, said the US Fund for the Protection of the Child
in a green paper on conditions of American children published in April
2001.
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 proportion of federal government posts taken by ethnic minority
Americans is much smaller than the proportion of their population in the
national total, says the article. Scandals of racial discrimination have
occurred one after another in recent years.
According to the 2000 population census of the US, blacks unable to
enjoy medical isurance are twice as many as 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.
Racial discrimination is frequently seen in America's judicature. Half
of the two million prison inmates are blacks, and ethnic Latin-Americans
account for 16 percent of the total.
The article quotes an investigative report published by the United
Nations as saying that 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 United States ranks first in the world in terms of military spending
and arms exports, says the article. The military expenditure of the
United States accounts for nearly 40 percent of the world total, more
than the combined military expenditure of the nine countries ranking
next to it.
The United States also ranks first in the world in wantonly infringing
upon the sovereignty of and human rights in other countries. It has used
force overseas on more than 40 occasions since 1990s.
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.
The NATO headed by the United States dropped a large number of depleted
uranium bombs during the Kosovo war, bringing serious threat and
destruction to local environments and the people. The United States also
dropped more than 940,000 depleted uranium bombs onto Iraqi
land.
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.
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 article says that 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, cooking up charges,
twisting facts and censoring all countries except itself.
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," notes the article.
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