RIGHTS-US: Amnesty Critical of U.S. Rights Record

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 22 1998 (IPS) - Amnesty International Thursday accused the United States of actively opposing efforts to strengthen human-rights standards worldwide and failing to enforce them at home.

“We are extremely concerned about the destructive role that the United States is playing more and more in the international arena,” declared Pierre Sane, secretary-general of the human rights watchdog..

Sane brought to the United Nations, Amnesty’s recently announced campaign to improve U.S. human rights. As evidence of his charges against Washington, he cited U.S. opposition to the International Criminal Court (ICC), established at a July conference in Rome despite Washington’s lobbying against it; the lack of access given to a U.N. rapporteur, Bacre Waly Ndiaye, who last year tried to investigate human rights in the United States; and an attempt to block an optional protocol which would raise the worldwide age for military recruitment to 18.

Sane criticised America’s domestic human-rights record – noting that the U.S. prison population has tripled since 1980 and also reports of abuse of women and children in prisons, detentions of asylum seekers and a surge in executions.

“How can the United States present or portray itself as the champion of human rights when its own house is not in order?” Sane argued. He criticised Washington’s “negative, obstructive role” in enforcing human rights both at home and abroad.

Sane presented detailed Amnesty allegations of rights violations in the United States to the U.N. General Assembly’s Third Committee, which deals with human rights.

Washington’s record on dealing with human rights at the United Nations, however, offers little hope of immmediate progress in improving the U.S. human rights picture here.

The United States was one of only seven countries which opposed the creation of the International Criminal Court during a recorded vote in Rome in July, compared to the 120 nations – including most of America’s key allies – which supported it.

This week, U.S. officials again underscored opposition to the ICC. Ambassador David Scheffer, head of the U.S. delegation at the Rome talks, said Wednesday that “the United States will not sign the (ICC) treaty in its present form, nor is there any prospect of our signing the present treaty text in the future.”

Scheffer complained that, under present guidelines, the Court could try U.S. military officials for “mistakenly” shooting civilians during a peacekeeping operation – one of several key issues that has rendered the Court “unacceptable” to Washington.

“We fear that, without the United States, the effectiveness of the permanent International Criminal Court will fall far short of its potential,” Scheffer warned.

Nor is the ICC the only case where Washington stands largely isolated from its allies on a major human rights question. Similarly, Sane noted, the United States is one of only six countries – along with Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Nigeria and Iran – to have executed children (legally, anyone who committed crimes before the age of 18) in the past decade.

In general, the Amnesty chief argued, Washington has tried to weaken human-rights bodies and protocols in which it does not even participate.

Besides the ICC, he said, the U.S. government has also lobbied behind the scenes against the U.N. Childrens’ Fund’s campaign for an optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which would raise the age of military recruitment from 15 to 18. Washington is doing this even though it has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

With the 50th anniversary this year of the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights focusing attention to many nations’ rights records, the United States has reacted defensively to several efforts to look at its performance.

Ndiaye, in his U.N. investigation of U.S. prisons and other rmance.

Ndiaye, in his U.N. investigation of U.S. prisons a