Originally published on the CGS blog on March 25, 2014.
With the U.N. Human Rights Committee reviewing the report the United States has submitted on its own human rights record this month, it’s an important time to review just what that record is. When the U.S. last went through this process in 2006, headlines frequently contained words like “torture,” “rendition,” and “war.” Are we doing better in 2014?
The biggest, most important headline today may be that we have a broken criminal justice system that desperately needs to be overhauled. Our system is systematically prejudiced against racial minorities and the impoverished. Harsh sentences result in overpopulation and an increasingly elderly and infirm prison population. Most infuriating of all is the system’s overdependence on solitary confinement, an egregious human rights violation that leaves some inmates locked alone in a cell for months and even years. Finally, 32 states still practice the death penalty, an irreversible punishment in a justice system that must admit of skepticism in the face of increasingly sophisticated criminal evidence and a growing body of knowledge of deep racial prejudices in convictions and sentencing.
Another major issue for the United States is its ongoing electronic surveillance of both U.S. citizens and people and governments around the world. While international terrorism remains an ongoing concern, news reports suggest that law enforcement agencies have expanded these programs to include all forms of communication of pretty much everyone on the planet. These programs are violations not only of rights to privacy but can also stifle free speech, especially as it becomes clearer that the government is desperate to hide details of these programs – the less certain we are of the details of the programs, the less certain we can be of the security of our speech. The end result is a climate of fear.
Also deeply concerning is the targeted assassination programs undertaken throughout the world. Assassination is itself problematic as it deprives a person of life in a non-combat situation without a fair trial; the targeted killings begun in the Bush administration and expanded in the Obama administration have used missiles launched from remotely operated aircraft to carry out these assassinations, and missiles can both kill several intended targets at once and, when used in populated areas (as is often the case), will kill people other than the intended target. While the Obama administration claims to have restricted the use of these secret programs, there is no place for assassination or the use of missiles in populated areas and these programs must end.
We should likewise be worried about the U.S. detention and mistreatment of non-citizens. The U.S. currently detains around 400,000 in its network of immigration detention centers. Mandatory detention (without the possibility of bail) deprives the accused of due process; deportation without due process is common; inhumane detention conditions occur frequently with inadequate food, medical care, or access to family or legal counsel. While these people may or may not be U.S. citizens, they are still humans, and they have rights to humane treatment, due process, and the same respect which we are all owed as human beings.
These are just a few highlights. Other issues in domestic affairs include troubling trends in freedom of the press, voting rights, concerns about gun violence, the status of the LGBT community, violence against women (especially in Native American territories), and more. Questions on these subjects and more came up during the question-and-answer session, and we should be troubled by them all.
Taken comprehensively with U.S. inaction on the ratification of key treaties like the Convention to Eliminate all Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, a troubling pattern of indifference toward the fundamental equality of all persons seems to be emerging. Even with U.S. progress since 2006, can we say that we’ve done enough to treat people with the dignity and respect they deserve? Frustratingly, I think the only answer is “no.” We need to take the U.S. appearance before the U.N. Human Rights Committee this month as a wake-up call: we can no longer claim to be the moral authority when it comes to human rights if we ever were. Let’s take this opportunity to make human rights the highest priority for the United States.
