In a document entitled The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2010, China detailed today what it considered the major human rights violations of the United States.
While some of the criticisms are not what we Americans would consider 'human rights' violations, such as our high incidence of violent and property crimes, they are surely valid complaints nonetheless.
Other complaints, such as the existence of the 2nd amendment to the US Constitution, are merely about unusual individual freedoms, as alien as that may seem to the government of China.
However, China's criticisms of the many documented cases of police abuse and brutality are clearly in the human rights category. As one example, the report cites an AP report of the NYPD paying about $964 million over the past decade to resolve such cases. While some number of these cases will inevitably happen in any system, forcing taxpayers to pay the penalty instead of the perpetrators is surely not an ideal remedy to the problem.
The report also cites the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs approval of the "Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act", which would give the government the power to shut down the Internet based only on its own determination of a 'national emergency'. Evidently, some in our government don't consider the NY Times website to be covered under the Constitutional protections that clearly apply to the NY Times paper edition.
Conversely, much of the report focuses on economic conditions and tries to relate them directly to the human rights record of the country. While many valid human rights violations may be embedded within those greater issues, this broad brush approach will not convince many who don't already believe it.
Similarly, statistical summaries of the different economic and other conditions of the various racial and ethnic minorities ignores the factor that different cultures and different peoples may be, in fact, different. Americans of Asian descent in general, and Chinese Americans in particular, for example, score extremely well in measures of educational attainment, professional employment, and business ownership here.
By assuming that these problems, as well as gender inequalities, are solely the result of discrimination, the Chinese report loses credibility. Every country has these problems. Large countries have these problems on a large scale.
I think China missed an opportunity to focus attention on clearly defined human rights issues. Instead, they criticized a wide range of our flaws in a rather undisciplined way. This report, unfortunately, will not force the US to examine -- or even defend -- its policies. |
| |
