Human rights in the United States

Historically, the human rights record of the United States of America has featured both promise and contradiction —an inspiring commitment to the protection of specific personal freedoms, and the occasional blatant disregard of those freedoms.

Overview

The egalitarian aspirations underlying the United States Constitution, upon which the United States is founded, were and are tempered with a political pragmatism that has occasionally undercut the human rights ideals that the document espouses. The Constitution created what was, in 1787 a distinguished progressive democracy that guaranteed unprecedented social and economic rights for much of its citizenry. Yet at the same time, the very same founding document implicitly [1] sanctioned slavery, which was not completely abolished until 1865 after the American Civil War, and lynching of blacks was relatively common into the early part of the 1900s. Only in 1968 did the Supreme Court rule explicitly against racial segregation laws.

This mixture of idealism and compromise has produced a paradoxical human rights record. The American system aims at a free society where life, liberty and a host of inalienable human rights are guaranteed by its Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Human rights in the United States of America are built on the self-evident truth that all men are born free and equal; however, by "men" at the time of writing, white males were meant.

The Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to a fair trial, freedom of religion, propery rights, equal suffrage, and freedom from discrimination based on race, color or religion. Such affirmations of human rights are the product of nearly four centuries of struggle and social progress aiming for a fair and just society, with its beginnings in 1634 when the first colonies in Maryland were founded on the basis of religious tolerance. However, some Americans attempting to exercise these fundamental human rights have been persecuted at various times throughout the country's history.

An example of such a right that has been denied would be the right to criticize the government openly. This practice, guaranteed under the Constitution, was nevertheless vigorously suppressed both early in the country's history (see Alien and Sedition Acts), and in later years, when charges of "Anti-Americanism" greeted political fringe groups. Such charges were pursued prominently at the start of the Cold War in 1950 by Senator Joseph McCarthy and earlier by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which investigated suspected Communists, some of which were confirmed later to have been foreign spies as revealed in 1995 in the VENONA project.

Most citizens tend to be optimistic about the United States Constitution and point out it is still a work in progress and changes to it are continuously under consideration as the needs of the society of the United States change. An example of this is how the status of human rights in the United States recently have come under scrutiny for the government's positions on capital punishment, police brutality, the War on Drugs, and sexual morality.

Finer points which are sometimes debated are a perceived media concentration that might drown out voices of dissent, campaign finance in the United States preventing a "fair" election, details of the justice system minimum sentencing guidelines, coercion into plea bargains and inadequate public defenders. Such issues often come up because of different interpretations of what is constitutional by the various authorities. Another "fine point" is the issue of abortion, which, unique among human rights-related issues, is often portrayed as a political split between the human rights of women, and the human rights of "unborn" children.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, pressure from the government for more surveillance of suspected terrorist cells activities has led to heightened criticism of the government's violation of suspected terrorists ' privacy and of control measures that do not respect suspected terrorist prisoners' dignity. In the aftermath of those attacks, there have been signs from the Federal government of the United States of a noticeable shift away from United States Constitution safeguards traditionally afforded American citizens, notably:

• Two Pakistani Americans allegedly affiliated with the Islamic militant group Harakat ul-Ansar were arrested in Pakistan by Pakistani authorities and held and alledgedly tortured in a Pakistani jail. The two allege that they were interrogated by men flashing FBI agents shields. [[2]]

• The detention without charge, for months on end, of United States citizens suspected of ties to insurgents in Iraq (for instance, for carrying washing machine timers in their car trunks). [[3]]. (The Associated Press reported on July 7 2005, that the United States was holding five Americans in Iraq.)

• The arrest, without charge, of large numbers of Muslim men as "material witnesses" in cases related to Terrorist activities in the United States.[[4]].

History

The history of human rights in the United States should begin with some reference to the birth of the nation itself and what was called "American experiment".

In the early years of the United States, slavery and indentured servitude were legal in roughly half of the states. The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1857 in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford that a slave who had entered a non-slave state did not automatically gain freedom by doing so, a ruling which was seen as upholding slavery. Slavery was outlawed by constitutional amendment after the American Civil War in 1865.

In some areas until the mid-20th century various segregation law discriminated between white and black Americans. There were also the so-called "Jim Crow" laws that effectively denied blacks rights that whites could take as granted. It took until 1968 for the United States Supreme Court to rule nearly all such laws unconstitutional. The same court ruled in the following decades in favor of laws and practices such as affirmative action which are believed by some to discriminate against white people.

Issues

Death penalty

File:Florida1.jpg

Execution chamber at the state prison in Starke, Florida. The only places in the world still employing the electric chair are the United States states of Alabama, Florida, Nebraska, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

The United States death penalty receives controversy from both within the United States and outside of it. Many regard the death penalty as inhumane and criticize it for its irreversibility. Additionally, a racial tilt to its application is suspected by some, since although blacks form only 13% of the total American population [5], 42% of those on death row are black (2003 [6]). These concerns recently prompted the governor of Illinois to place a moratorium on all executions in his state.

Up until 2005, it was legal in United States to execute juvenile offenders. Since 1990 Amnesty International recorded 38 executions of offenders who committed their crimes when they were under the age of 18, 19 of them in the USA. Along with Somalia, the United States is one of the two sovereign states in the world not to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits use of the death penalty against child offenders. [7] On March 1, 2005 the United States Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that it is unconstitutional to execute juvenile killers, commuting the death sentences of 72 murderers who were under 18 when they committed their crimes.

Prison

As of 2004 the United States had the highest percentage of people in prison of any nation. At a rate of incarceration of 726 inmates per 100,000 population the United States has the highest reported rate in the world, well ahead of the Russian rate of 532 per 100,000. More than 2.1 million, or roughly 1 out of every 138, Americans are in jail at any moment, a figure which represents one third of the world's prison population. To illustrate these figures, if the United States had the same rate of incarceration as Japan or China, only about 100,000 people would be in jail. [8]

Because the legal system has imposed liability upon employers for negligence in hiring ex-convicts and in supervising them, many employers now make background checks a mandatory part of the hiring process. As a result, prisoners who are released often have difficulty finding jobs and often return to crime to support themselves.

Racial minorities, notably Blacks and Hispanics, are over-represented in the US's prison population. According to Human Rights Watch, "black men [in 2000] were eight times more likely to be in prison than white men". [9] According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, approximately 40.2% of the prison population is black, while 32.1% of the population is Hispanic, [10] with several enquiries and critics commenting negatively on the use of racial profiling and the overrepresentation of minorities in American prisons.

Sexual abuse in United States prisons is believed by many to be widespread. It has been fought against by organizations such as Stop Prisoner Rape, some of whom allege that some wardens use sexual abuse as a control tool in the prisons.

The United States also has "supermax prisons", where the most dangerous prisoners are kept in soundproofed solitary confinement for 23 hours a day with almost no human contact. They are often defended as appropriate for mass murderers, but there have been reports that some nonviolent prisoners have been sent to supermaxes.

In many states, those convicted of felony offenses are banned from voting. These laws have a much greater effect on minorities, especially African Americans, as they are more likely to be convicted of felonies. In some United States cities, for example, half of all black men cannot vote, and in states such as Florida and Alabama, as many as a third of black men cannot vote. For this reason, the constitutionality of this practice is likely to be tested in the United States Supreme Court in due course. (see Count Every Vote Act)

National security exceptions

The United States government has on several occasions claimed exceptions to guaranteed rights on grounds of protecting national security. It typically invokes exceptions in wartime or during international conflicts short of war (such as the Cold War). In some instances the federal courts have allowed these exceptions, while in others the courts have decided that the national security interest was insufficient.

Sedition laws have sometimes placed restrictions on freedom of expression. The Alien and Sedition Acts, passed by president John Adams during an undeclared naval conflict with France, allowed the government to punish "false" statements about the government and to deport "dangerous" immigrants. The Federalist Party used these acts to harass supporters of the Democratic-Republican Party. Congress passed another broad sedition law during World War I. Its provisions were so strict that the government imprisoned one Hollywood director for making a film about the American Revolution because it depicted the British unfavorably. These laws lapsed or became inactive at the end of the conflict.

Presidents have claimed the power to imprison summarily, under military jurisdiction, those suspected of being combatants for states or groups at war against the United States. Abraham Lincoln invoked this power in the American Civil War to imprison Maryland secessionists. In that case, the Supreme Court concluded that only Congress could suspend the right of habeas corpus, and the government released the detainees. During World War II, the United States interned thousands of Japanese-Americans on fears that Japan might use them as saboteurs. In the recent campaign against terrorist groups, the government has detained suspected al Qaeda affiliates like Yaser Esam Hamdi, who also had his citizenship revoked.

The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution forbids unreasonable search and seizure without a warrant, but some administrations have claimed exceptions to this rule to investigate alleged conspiracies against the government. During the Cold War, the FBI established COINTELPRO to infiltrate and disrupt left-wing organizations, including those that supported the rights of black Americans. More recently the USA PATRIOT Act has been attacked as eroding Fourth Amendment protections.

National security, as well as other concerns like unemployment, have sometimes led the United States to toughen its generally liberal immigration policy. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 all but banned Chinese immigrants, who were accused of crowding out American workers. Today foreign nationals can be detained or deported for minor infractions, although deporation is uncommon. The government is sometimes accused of skirting the required legal procedures. Tracking of immigrants has also increased as part of the anti-terrorism campaign, so that foreigners arriving by air are now subject to mandatory fingerprinting and photography. Since 2002, male adults from any of two dozen countries, most of them Muslim, have been subject to Special Registration. The United States is sometimes criticized for the effects of its border control efforts; for instance, between 1998 and 2004, 1,954 persons are officially reported to have died along the United States Mexico barrier.

Freedom of expression

Freedom of expression (including speech, media, and public assembly) is broader in the United States than in many countries with liberal governments. According to Supreme Court precedent, the federal and lower governments may not apply prior restraint based on content. Insults against the government, ethnic groups, and religious groups are allowed. Symbols of the government or its officials may be destroyed in protest, including the American flag.

Significant legal limits on expression per se include

• crimes involving sexual obscenity, solicitation, fraud, specific threats of violence, or disclosure of classified information
• civil offenses involving defamation or fraud
• Federal Communications Commission rules governing the use of broadcast media
• ordinances requiring mass demonstrations on public property to register in advance, and sometimes to use specific venues (see free speech zone)

Health and the family

In recent years several human rights issues regarding health and the family have been widely debated across the United States.

The first is the question of whether a woman has a right to terminate a pregnancy or, as it is cast by opponents of abortion, whether the unborn child has a right to life. Although a Supreme Court decision (Roe vs. Wade) has established that a woman does have a right to abortion, opponents of that decision have been pressing for the appointment of judges who might reverse that ruling.

At the other end of life, are the questions of whether a terminally-ill person has the right to decide the time of death (euthanasia) and whether the families of patients who have permanently lost all brain activity can end medical care or stop feeding. Both questions have been hotly contested and families are sometimes forced to endure lengthy court battles.

Unlike many other industrialized countries, the United States does not treat health care as a fundamental human right and therefore provides only a limit amount of publicly funded medicine. This has resulted in a wide gap in the quality of treatment between those who can afford health insurance and those who cannot. Some opponents of universal health care would say that they have a right to be free of government interference and taxation. (See Health care in the United States and Canadian and American health care systems compared)

While some countries such as Canada and Spain have been moving to recognize same-sex marriage, the issue remains hotly contested in the United States. There has recently been talk of enshrining the traditional definition of marriage (one man and one woman) within the Constitution. (See Same-sex marriage in the United States).

Assessments of human rights organizations

Amnesty International states for the year 2000:

Police brutality, disputed shootings and ill-treatment in prisons and jails were reported. In May the U.N. Committee against Torture considered the initial report of the USA on implementation of the U.N. Convention against Torture. Eighty-five prisoners were executed in 14 states bringing to 683 the total number of people executed since 1976. Those executed included individuals who were children under 18 at the time of their crimes, and the mentally impaired.

In 2005 the organization expressed alarm at the erosion in civil liberties since the 9/11 attacks. According to Amnesty:

The Guantánamo Bay detention camp has become a symbol of the United States administration’s refusal to put human rights and the rule of law at the heart of its response to the atrocities of 11 September 2001. It has become synonymous with the United States executive’s pursuit of unfettered power, and has become firmly associated with the systematic denial of human dignity and resort to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that has marked the USA’s detentions and interrogations in the "war on terror".[11]

Amnesty also condemned the Guantánamo facility as "the gulag of our times," a label that gave rise to a heated controversy over its validity.

The purported legal status of "unlawful combatants" in those nations currently holding detainees under that name has been the subject of criticism by other nations and international human rights institutions including Human Rights Watch and the International Committee of the Red Cross. The ICRC, in response to the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan, published a paper on the subject The legal situation of unlawful/unprivileged combatants (IRRC March 2003 Vol.85 No 849). See Unlawful combatant.

China's assessment

Main article: China's Human Rights Record of the United States

Annually since 1999 the People's Republic of China has been publishing reports on the annual human rights record in the United States of America for the preceding year. This is in response to the practice of the United States of publishing similar "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices" about almost every country, except the United States. Like the reports from the United States State Department, these reports are based largely on evidence published by Western media, or by United States governmental authorities themselves. They are entitled "Human Rights Record of the United States", and published by the Information Office of the State Council. The latest report, covering 2004 noted in particular that:

":Racial discrimination is deeply rooted in the United States...permeating every aspect of society.

It said that people of color are generally poor, with living conditions much worse than that of white people. According to The Guardian newspaper on October 9, the average net assets of a white family was US$88,000 in 2002, 11 times that of a family of Latin American ancestry, and nearly 15 times that of a family of African ancestry.

Racial prejudice is ubiquitous in judicial fields, the report said. The United States Department of Justice said in November that non-white people accounted for over 70 percent of inmates."

See also

• Civil rights
• Human rights
• China's Assessment of the Human Rights Record of the United States

External links

• UN investigator who exposed U.S. army abuse forced out of his job
• Current US-related reports from Amnesty International
• China section of "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices -- 2001" (United States Department of State)
• China's report on U.S. human rights records (all from People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China):
  • "Human Rights Record of the United States in 2000"
  • "Human Rights Record of the United States in 2001"
  • "Human Rights Record of the United States in 2003"
  • "Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004"

• Human Rights Watch: US
• IFEX: Censorship in the US