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Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page. | The United States has an established legal tradition of providing strong protection for civil rights and human rights. (disputed — see talk page) Its founding document, the United States Constitution and in particular the Bill of Rights, provides for certain guaranteed rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, right to trial, right to a jury, right against self-incrimination, right against warrantless search and seizure, and the banning of cruel and unusual punishment.
Many view the United States as an exemplary human-rights leader and consider these enumerated rights to be among the strongest in the world, while critics point to what they see as hypocrisy in both the domestic and the foreign policies of the United States government and claim that the rights formally guaranteed by the American constitution have been eroded.
Negative views of and criticism about America are often described as "anti-Americanism", although they are also held by many political liberals in the United States. (disputed — see talk page) At stake in the debate are controversial issues such as 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, and the details of the justice system (minimum sentencing laws, coercion into plea bargains, inadequate public defenders, etc.).
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, pressure from the government of the United States for more surveillance of the general population has led to heightened criticism of the government's violation of citizens' privacy and of control measures that do not respect prisoner dignity.
History
In the early years of the United States, slavery and indentured servitude were legal in several states. The U.S. 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 and Jim Crow laws discriminated between white and black Americans. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled nearly all such laws unconstitutional by 1968, and in the following decades ruled in favor of laws and practices such as affirmative action which discriminated against white people.
Issues
Death penalty The use of the death penalty is controversial, both in the U.S. and outside it. Many regard the death penalty as inhumane and criticize it for its irreversibility.
It is claimed that erroneous convictions have led to executions, although there is no proof that any innocent person has been put to death since the death penalty was reinstated in 1973. (disputed — see talk page) And although blacks form only 13% of the total American population [1] (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762156.html), 42% of those on death row are black (2003 statistics [2] (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/drracetab.htm)).
Recently the governor of Illinois placed a moratorium on all executions due to these concerns.
The United States sometimes executes juvenile offenders: since 1990 Amnesty International has recorded 38 executions of child offenders worldwide, 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. [3] (http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGACT500152004?open&of=ENG-USA)
Prison The US has one of the highest percentages of people in prison of any modern nation—as of 2004, the second-highest in the world. [4] (http://www.hrw.org/wr2k1/usa/#drug&race) Roughly 2 million, or roughly 1 out of every 150, Americans are in jail at any moment.
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". [5] (http://www.hrw.org/wr2k1/usa/#drug&race) According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, approximately 40.2% of the prison population is black, while 32.1% of the population is Hispanic, [6] (http://www.bop.gov/fact0598.html) with several enquiries and critics commenting negatively on the use of racial profiling and the overrepresentation of minorities in American prisons. `However, others note that these groups commit crimes at a far higher rate than white Americans. (disputed — see talk page)
Sexual abuse in US 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 U.S. 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 affect on minorities, especially African Americans, as they are more likely to be convicted of felonies. In some US cities, for example, half of all black men cannot vote. For this reason, the constitutionality of this practice is likely to be tested in the U.S. Supreme Court in due course.
National security exceptions The US government has on several occasions claimed exceptions to guaranteed rights on grounds of protecting national security. These exceptions are often invoked 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. They were used by the Federalist Party to harass supporters of the Democratic-Republican Party. Another broad sedition law was passed during World War I by Woodrow Wilson. Its provisions were so strict that one Hollywood director was imprisoned 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. This power was invoked by Abraham Lincoln in the American Civil War to imprison Maryland secessionists. In that case, the Supreme Court protested that only Congress could suspend the right of habeas corpus, and the detainees were released. During World War II, thousands of Japanese-Americans were interned 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 The United States is widely recognized as one of the most free countries in terms of Freedom of Expression. In contrast to many democracies, the United States does not prohibit the desecration of its flag (or of any other symbol, for that matter). The Flag Burning Amendment sought to give Congress the power to ban acts of desecration against the American Flag, but it narrowly failed to pass. Prior Restraint is recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as unconstitutional on its face, and there are no bans on extremist left-wing or right-wing parties (e.g. the Communist Party or Neo-Nazi parties. American libel laws are also far more liberal than those of other major democracies, such as the United Kingdom.
Amnesty International assessment 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.
Many (disputed — see talk page) people disagree with the UN and Amnesty International assessment. Some of the reasons given by those who disagree with various aspects: they do not accept low intelligence quotient as an excuse for capital crimes (see [7] (http://www.oyez.org/oyez/resource/case/1483/)), and they feel that some older teenagers should be tried as adults due to the nature of the offense, though no other government in the world takes this view. Not all US citizens who support execution share all of these views.
China's assessment Main article: China's assessment of the human rights record of the United States
Annually since 2001 (with the exception of the year 2003), the People's Republic of China has been publishing reports on the annual human rights record in the United States of America, as its response to the criticisms from the United States on China's human rights issues. These reports, entitled "Human Rights Record of the United States", and published by the Information Office of the State Council, attack the state of human rights in the United States and have been published subsequent to the "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices" for China by the United States Department of State, which all reports cite in the first paragraph. Critics of China's "report" say it contains nothing of substance but disconnected allegations intended to divert attention from China's own troubling record.
See also
External links - Current US-related reports from Amnesty International (http://web.amnesty.org/library/eng-usa/index)
- China section of "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices -- 2001" (http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2001/eap/8289.htm) (United States Department of State)
- China's report on U.S. human rights records (all from People's Daily):
- Human Rights Watch: [8] (http://hrw.org/wr2k1/usa/)
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