The US State Department has released its annual Human Rights Report, highlighting the legal status of human rights in over 190 countries and painting America’s record as near perfect.
The US view of its own human rights past is peculiar; given the administration’s record of supporting foreign dictators guilty of various human rights violations of their own. On top of that is the ongoing detention of accused WikiLeaks leaker Pfc. Bradley Manning and the legal case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.Do actions speak louder than words when it comes to US human rights policies? The report screams of absolute hypocrisy according to a number of activists.The report targets nations like China, Russia, Pakistan, Venezuela and others. Human rights activist Brian Becker, a national coordinator with the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition explained China responded with their own report, one targeting the US for its attacks on WikiLeaks and on the use of human rights as a weapon of diplomacy.“It’s [the report] seen largely right now as an act of great hypocrisy,” Becker said. “The US trying to judge and be the judge for the rest of the world while practicing immense human rights violations at home. People in the US are unable to get jobs, go to school and live an adequate life. Many end up in prison because of economic injustices, he argued. “A black boy born in 2001, according to the Childrens Defense Fund, is three times as likely to end up in prison than in college. 30 million people are unemployed or under employed or stopped looking for work. In spite of the biggest housing contraction boom in history in the last 10 years nine million families have even been foreclosed, that is thrown out of their homes, or threatened with foreclosure because they cannot pay their debts while the US government gave $3 trillion to the banks when they couldn’t pay their debts,” Becker said. “You see a grotesque violation of human rights.”China has its issues, he said, but the US under US President Barack Obama is violating human rights at home and abroad in its ties with foreign governments that commit crimes against human rights and ongoing wars. The US condemns the China for secret prisons, he noted, when it is common knowledge that the US maintained such prisons in Afghanistan under Bush and continues to do so under Obama. The United States carried out regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq and would like to do so elsewhere, with China, Venezuela, Russia and others it sees as competitions, Becker argued, thus they target them in these reports. “The United States does not want any regional or semi-global power to emerge that would rival US hegemony,” he said. “The real point of the report is to delegitimize governments so that the United States, and in particular the CIA can work overtime to then take a delegitimized government or regime and carry out some sort of political turmoil so that that government can be replaced with a government that the United States government considers to be an ally, a proxy or a client.”