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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, 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 US
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.
Information
Office of the State Council
of the People's Republic of China
March 11,2002
Beijing
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