U.S. Human Rights Record in 1999

 

   The human rights report of the year 1999 issued by the U.S. State Department on February 26 ignored China's improving human rights and vigorously attacked China again out of its unflinching political bias. The U.S. report also criticizes almost every other country for its human rights situation, but is silent about the human rights problems in the U.S. It is therefore quite necessary to have a look at the U.S. human rights record in 1999.

 

I. Civil, Political Rights Endangered

 

   In the United States, the safety of the general public and individuals is threatened by the presence of a huge number of privately-owned firearms and widespread violent crime. According to the latest estimates by the U.S. Department of Justice, Americans now own about 235 million guns, roughly one per person on average.

 

   According to a Reuters report on April 22, 1999, the United States reports an average of one million gun-related murders annually. Since 1972, over 30,000 people have died in gun-related homicides, accidents and suicides every year.

 

   An AP report on April 16, 1998, citing a government study, showed that "the United States has by far the highest rate of gun deaths -- murders, suicides, and accidents -- among the world's 36 richest nations." 

 

   DPA, the German news agency, reported on May 10, 1999, that in 1995 there were 21,600 murders and accidental killings in the United States, including 15,551 shootings causing 35,673 deaths.

 

   Between 1985-1995, the number of juvenile crimes tripled, while the number of gun-related murders by juveniles quadrupled. In 1997, there were 6,044 gun-related murders involving young people aged between 15-24.    

 

   Shooting rampages at high schools have frequently made headlines in the United States, with one out of every ten schools witnessing at least one severe criminal incident every year. The number of cases of gun-related violence has been increasing. In 1997-98, 48 people were killed as a result of violence in schools.

 

    In April 1999, in the most notorious and tragic case in U.S. history, two high school students with guns and home-made bombs slaughtered 13 teachers and students and injured another 25 at Columbine High School in the state of Colorado.

 

   According to official statistics, an average of 15 out of every 100,000 young Americans are shot dead annually. The accidental shooting death rate among American children under 15 is 15 times higher than that of the total of other 25 industrialized countries.

 

   Police brutality is common in the U.S. and cases of judicial corruption are on the rise. According to a U.S. newspaper Workers World’s report on March 25 1999, 65 incidents of police brutality were reported in Chicago between 1972-91, but none of the police officers involved were dealt with. In 1996, 3,000 people sued local police officers in this American city, but none of the accused were dismissed. In San Francisco, between 1990-95, 4.1 out of every 100 murders were caused by police shootings. And not a single police officer has been sued for shootings at random in the city, though there were 1,000-2,000 complaints against local police officers in the city each year.

 

   In the last five years, 756 former law-enforcement officials have been convicted of corruption, brutal conduct and other crimes, setting a new record in this regard. By June 1999, there had been 655 inmates in the federal prisons who were formerly law- enforcement officials, compared with 107 inmates in 1994, an increase of five times, according to USA Today's report on July 29, 1999. 

 

   The United States, which proclaims itself the "land of the freedom," ranks first in the world in the proportion of prisoners among the population. According to statistics issued by the bureau of justice statistics of the U.S Department of Justice in 1999, the number of American adults in prison, on probation and on parole topped 5.92 million in 1998, accounting for three percent of the total population, while 1.82 million of them were incarcerated in state or federal prisons, more than double the figure of 744,000 reported at the end of 1985 and setting a new record.

 

   Between 1985-98, the number of prisoners in the country increased by 7.3 percent annually. Meanwhile, the imprisonment rate went up by more than 100 percent as the number of prisoners out of every 100,000 Americans increased from 313 to 668. AFP

reported on February 16, 2000, that by February 15, 2000, the number of American prisoners had topped two million, to account for one fourth of the world's total, ranking first in the world.

 

   In overcrowded American prisons, inmates are mistreated and violence prevails. Between 1990-97, the average jail term of American prisoners increased from 22 months to 27 months, while the rate of inmates to be released dropped to 31 percent from 37 percent every year; the number of paroled convicts who were sentenced again increased by 39 percent; and the number of new inmates rose by four percent, according to a report by Chicago Tribune on March 22, 1999.

 

   By December 31, 1998, state prisons reported they were housing 13-22 percent more convicts than their facilities were designed to accommodate; the figure was 27 percent in federal prisons, and 100 percent in 33 state prisons.

 

   The leading American newspaper the New York Times reported in April, 1999, that in a prison in Nassau County in the state of New York, an shockingly large number of inmates had been brutally beaten and some died as a result of the abuse, but none of the

prison guards involved were charged for their criminal behavior. 

 

   In the United States, the number of inmates who have died of senility in prison is higher than the number of those who have been released from jail after serving their terms. In 1999, there were over 36,000 elderly inmates, compared with around 9,500 in the early 1980s. Over 220,000 more inmates are expected to join the ranks of the aged within 10 years.

 

   American prisons have used a large number of inmates as laborers to generate profit. These prisoner-workers are paid between 23 cents and 1.15 dollars a day, though the minimum wage set by the U.S. government stands at 5.15 dollars per hour.

 

   The Boston Globe reported on September 26, 1999, that prisoners in 94 federal prisons under the U.S. Department of Justice were working for a company to manufacture electronic parts, furniture, clothing and other goods. In 1998, the company generated nearly 540 million U.S. dollars in sales.

 

   Some American prisons have begun to charge prisoners for fees of imprisonment. American companies that were looking for cheap labor abroad in the 1980s are now taking advantage of the 1.8 million prisoner-laborers at home. Two American firms have signed contracts with government departments on managing and charging nearly 100,000 inmates in over 100 jails. The two contractors would charge each prisoner 35 U.S. dollars per day for food and management and they could earn 12.78 million U.S. dollars within the contract term, if the number of the prisoners would not decline, the U.S. Insight Weekly reported in its May 4, 1999 edition.

 

   The United States insists that there is no political prisoner in the country. But the April 29, 1999 issue of the U.S.-based bi-monthly Workers' World reported that at least 150 political prisoners were jailed in the country. Many of them were incarcerated as a result of an FBI counter-intelligence operation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which targeted all those who took part in campaigns against oppression and Southeast Asian wars and supported the independence of Puerto Rico. Some 768 members of the Black Panther organization were arrested and jailed following the FBI operation.

 

   The self-proclaimed freedom of the United States has always served the interests of a small number of wealthy people. In 1998, a book titled "The Buy of Congress: How Special Interests Have Stolen Your Right to Life, Liberty, & the Pursuit of Happiness" was published in the United States exposing how the U.S. Congress has become a tool of special interest groups.

 

   According to the book, between 1987-96, 500 large American companies donated at least 182 million U.S. dollars to congressmen and 73 million U.S. dollars to Democratic and Republican parties. In the same period, "donations" from major U.S. cigarette manufacturers to congressmen and the two parties exceeded 30 million U.S. dollars. Health and medical companies donated 72 million U.S. to congressmen, while the Congress helped large and medium-sized firms reduce the cost of medical insurance for their employees.

 

   Although gun-related tragedies have become all too common in the United States, the National Rifle Association (NRA) spent 1.5 million U.S. dollars over a two-month period to lobby the congressmen who bowed to the NRA and vetoed a gun control bill

which was strongly favored by the majority of the American people. The veto of the bill, coupled with other practices, has soured the American people on their political interest, and the voting rate for the 1998 mid-term election hit a record low of 36.1 percent. Compared with 1994, voting rates in 36 states declined, with a 4.3-percent drop for Republican voters and a 2.1-percent fall for Democrats.

 

II. Infringement on Citizens' Economic and Social Rights

 

   The United States is the most developed nation in the world today, with its economy growing for the ninth consecutive year. But the American working class are suffering from the infringement of their economic and social rights.

 

   A vast chasm exists between the rich and the poor in America. The British weekly magazine, the Economist, said in an October 3 1998 article that the income of the richest families, accounting for one fifth of the total American families, made up a half of the total income of American families, while the earnings of the poorest families, about one fifth of the total, earned a mere four percent of the overall figure. 

 

   A September 1999 report by the U.S. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed that the income of the 2.7 million richest Americans was equal to that of the 100 million poorest. Another report released last month by the U.S. Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said that in the late 1990s, the average annual income of the richest one fifth families stood at 137,500 U.S. dollars, 10 times that of the poorest one fifth, which was about 13,000 U.S. dollars. The disparity in  Washington D.C, U.S. capital, ranks first in the country with a 27-fold difference between the incomes of the rich and the poor. In 46 states, the income gap between the richest one fifth and the poorest one fifth families is larger than it was 20 years ago. In the past 10 years, the average annual income for the richest one fifth of families has increased by 15 percent, while for the poorest one fifth the increase is less than one percent. In fact, the average annual income after taxes for the poorest families has decreased in the past 20 years, since the minimum wage and medium income have not increased or dropped in the past two decades. According to a local report which was reported by the Washington Post on August 30 1999, the gap between the average salaries of senior managers and ordinary staff in American companies grew to as much as 419:1 in 1998 from the 1980 proportion of 42:1. In 1998, chief executive officers of big companies boasted an average yearly income of 10.6 million U.S. dollars, six times of the 1990 figure of 1.8 million U.S. dollars.

 

   American workers have experienced serious infringement of their rights on the job. The Chicago Tribune reported on September 6 1999, that in the past 20 years, almost all American workers have experienced a declining wage in a certain degree, while their

working hours have increased.

 

   The International Labor Organization issued a report on September 6, 1999, indicating that American workers have the longest working hours among all the industrialized nations, with an individual worker's yearly work time extended by 83 hours, or almost four percent, compared with 1980.

 

   The International Federation of Free Trade Unions said in a July 1999 report that the United States had been engaged in a "large-scaled, sustained and surprising" infringement of the rights of laborers, including infringement of the rights of trade unions

and using children and prisoners as cheap labor. 

 

   Some 40 percent, or almost seven million of the country's public servants were deprived of the right to participate in labor negotiations with their employers, and at the same time, more than two million government employees have been banned from staging

strikes or bargaining over their work hours or salary.

 

   The rights of employees of private businesses have not been protected, while laws governing private companies' unlawful activities are often weak or ineffective. Only one of seven core labor standards of the International Labor Organization has been ratified by the United States, which is "one of the worst ratification records in the world," reported the Reuters on July 14, 1999.

 

   The United States is the only major industrial power that has not adopted a compulsory medical insurance system. According to a report by the U.S. Department of Commerce, 43,448,000 Americans, or 16.1 percent of the total population, live without medical insurance; 11.2 million, or 31.6 percent of poor Americans have no medical insurance; and 30 percent of New York residents do not have medical insurance for the most part of a year. 

 

   The poor population in the country has increased, rather than declined. Currently, the United States is adopting an austere economic policy to reduce spending, regardless of the effect this has on ordinary citizens, posing a threat to the living conditions of tens of millions of Americans. A Department of Commerce report disclosed that 35.8 million Americans live in extreme poverty, a figure which accounts for 13.3 percent of the total population; in other words, one out of every 6.5 Americans is poor.

 

   A survey published last April said that the United States has 60 million poverty-stricken people, which represents 22.5 percent of the total population. A Columbia University report in 1999 noted that 29 percent of New York residents live under the poverty line, while the income of five percent of New Yorkers is only one-fifth of the sum set for the poverty line, and 17 percent of New Yorkers often cannot afford to pay their bills on time, according to a report released by the Efe news agency on March 3, 1999.

 

   The number of Americans who suffer from hanger and are homeless has been increasing. A report issued by the American Conference of Mayors on December 16, 1999, said that the number of the homeless and hungry in big cities who are in urgent need of food and shelter is higher than at any time in recent history. In 1999, the number of people who applied for urgent food is the largest ever and 18 percent more than the figure of 1998.

 

   According to another report issued on January 20, 2000 and picked up by Reuters, more than 30 million Americans live in families that are short of food, 7.2 percent of American families cannot secure their daily need, and children in 15.2 percent of American families are starving. In 1999, the number of people in big cities who applied for temporary housing went up by 12 percent. In San Francisco, nearly 14,000 were homeless and at least 169 people died of exposure, drug addiction, illness and violence in the streets.

 

   A 1994 study made in New York after a series of incidents involving vagrants being killed showed that 80 percent of these homeless had become the target of violent crimes.

 

   According to an AFP story on December 16, 1999, a survey published last December found that among the homeless questioned, 66 percent were suffering from chronic illness, one-third of them were parents, one-fourth were children, one-third were veterans, and 49 percent were mental patients in need of treatment.

 

III. Serious Problems of Racial Discrimination

 

   Racial discrimination is the most serious social problem plaguing the United States. The U.S. Administration's handling of Chinese American scientist Wen Ho Lee's alleged spy case once again revealed that racial discrimination is prevalent in the U.S.    Without any FBI evidence to prove Lee's alleged act of espionage, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Lee on charges of illegal use of classified information and some other charges.

 

   The report said a former FBI head had been involved in an act similar to Wen Ho Lee, but he was only prohibited access to any classified documents. However, Lee has been under surveillance by FBI agents for over one year and has been held in prison without bail. People widely believe that Lee has been unfairly targeted because of his race. 

 

   U.S. bi-monthly Workers' World pointed out in its December 23 issue that a U.S. survey conducted in October 1999 indicated that racial prejudice is deeply rooted in U.S. culture -- a fact that Americans either do not realize or do not willingly admit.  

 

   Racial discrimination is a nationwide phenomena in the U.S. Though the number of black people stands at only 13 percent of the total U.S. population, the number of black prisoners accounts for 49 percent of all U.S. prisoners. The number of imprisoned black women is eight times higher than that of white women.

 

   An investigation released by a U.S. medical treatment association in March, 1999 showed that only 15.3 percent of the whites are under the poverty line while 45.7 percent of Hispanics and 42.5 percent of blacks are poor.

 

   A September 2 report by a U.S. immigration research center indicated that the poverty rate of the immigrants rose by 123 percent between 1979 and 1997 and the population of poor immigrants grew from 2.7 million to 7.7 million.

 

   Between 1989 and 1997, among the poor population, 3 million are immigrants, accounting for 75 percent of the newly increased poor population in the country.

 

   A March 17 report by Efe showed that Whites receive an average 12.8 years of education in the U.S., while blacks receive 11.8 years and Hispanics 9.3 years on average.

 

   Among whites in New York, at least three out of 10 people have college degrees, while less than 10 percent of the Hispanics and African Americans in the city have received university education.

 

   In the United States, the Black, Hispanic and American Indian population accounts for 24 percent of the U.S. total population, but the number of doctors of these races only stands at 7 percent of the country's total doctors.

 

   According to U.S. statistics from 1996, the expected average life expectancy of a white male child is 74 years, and 80 years for a white female, while the averages for black male and female children are 66 and 74 years respectively.

 

   The infant mortality rates for black and American Indian infants are 2.0 and 1.5 times higher that than that of white infants.

 

   The report also indicated that 38 percent of Hispanics and 24 percent of blacks in America do not have medical insurance, while only 14 percent of whites have no medical insurance. 

 

   Black farmers are discriminated against in obtaining preferential loans, and the ethnic minorities are also discriminated against in receiving medical treatment for AIDS.

 

   Police brutality stemming from racial discrimination frequently occurs in the U.S.  A survey of the black residents by the New York Times on March 16, 1999 showed that 55 percent of the Hispanics and 63 percent of the blacks believed that police violence is on the rise. Some 67 percent of Hispanics in the U.S. believed that the U.S. police are biased in favor of whites.

 

   The U.S. police all too often suspect colored people are guilty of crime, even when little or no evidence is available to support their charges. According to a report of a human rights watch group released in San Francisco, California in March of 1999, of the people killed or injured when shot by police, 75 percent are minorities or from low-income districts. U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno has reported that in the past five years, the Justice Department has dealt with over 300 cases of police abuse of power.

 

   On February 5, 1999, four New York police opened fire on a 22-year-old black west African immigrant and killed him with 24 bullets, saying they mistook him for a suspect. The high-profile case has come to symbolize the violent behavior of the American police.

 

   The New York Times reported on May 2, 1999, that black families, either rich or poor, are afraid of being mistaken as criminals and shot by police.

 

   Race-related killings are also on the rise. Various white supremacy groups have formed throughout the country, based on the principle that all black, Jewish, and Asian people are inferior and constantly arranging racially-motivated acts of violence.    Statistics indicated that the number of such hate groups has increased from 474 in 1997 to 537 in 1998. The U.S. Department of Justice has announced that out of nearly 9,000 murder cases in 1998, over half are race-related. 

 

   The statistics released by the Department of Justice in 1999 showed that between 1992 and 1996, 124 of every 1,000 Indians over 12 years old were victims of criminal acts. The figure is twice that for black children and 2.5 times more than the country's

average.

 

IV. Rights and Interests of Women and Children Violated

 

   Gender discrimination is a chronic malady in the United States. According to a report of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in January 2000, the U.S. Congress is made up of only 12.9 percent women. The latest survey from the National Women and Police Center showed that from 1990 to 1997, the number of women in the law enforcement

departments across the country increased by just 3.2 percent. One-third of the 176 police organizations surveyed have no women as senior officers, according to a report in USA Today on April 14, 1999.

 

   Women, who make up some 45 percent of the U.S. work force, earned on average only 75 percent as much as men, black women only 65 percent, and Hispanic women only 57 percent, according to a Reuters report on July 14, 1999. It also said that women with higher education earned only 76 percent of the amount men did.

 

   The United States has poor labor rights protection and social security for women. American women have only three months of unpaid maternity leave, and are not allowed any time off for breast-feeding after they go back to work, according to an International Labor Organization study of 152 countries released in February 1998. It also showed that about 40 percent of the female employees with children have no medical insurance.

 

   Reuters reported on September 21, 1999 that the marriage rate has plummeted by a third since 1960. It said there were about 73 marriages per 1,000 unmarried women aged 15 and up in 1960. In 1996, the rate was about 49 per 1,000.

 

   An AP report on November 23, 1999 said that a survey of the University of Chicago showed that the percentage of American households made up of married couples with children dropped from 45 percent in the early 1970s to just 26 percent in 1998.

 

   The number of single-mother families in the United States is increasing, and poverty is becoming a bigger threat to these families. From 1995 to 1997, the income of poorest single-parent families headed by women, which make up one-fifth of the total number of American families, has dropped by nearly seven percent, according to an article in the British journal the Economist released on August 28, 1999. 

 

   Women are the major victims of domestic violence. The U.S. Department of Justice estimated that there are at least 4.2 million cases of domestic violence in the country each year, and 95 percent of the victims are women.

 

   The human rights of female prisoners are seriously violated in the U.S. In 1997, some 138,000 women were incarcerated in the United States, three times more than in 1985, according to a report from Amnesty International in March 1999. Male prison

guards are also accused of sexually harassing women inmates during routine searches, and female inmates are often raped.

 

   According to the report, 41 percent of the personnel who come into contact with women inmates in the U.S. are male, which runs counter to regulations established by the United Nations.

 

   In 1997 to 1998, more than 2,200 pregnant women were imprisoned and more than 1,300 children were born in prison, said Amnesty International. In at least 40 states, babies are taken from their imprisoned mothers almost immediately after birth or at the time the mother is discharged from hospital. In many American prisons, female inmates have to wait for several months before they can receive medical care from doctors.

 

   The state of children in the U.S. is grim. The United States, one of the few countries which have death penalty for juveniles, has the highest number of juveniles sentenced to death in the world.

 

   Since 1994, 43 American states have revised their juvenile delinquency laws, and made sure juvenile delinquents receive the same punishment as adult criminals, which violates the regulations of the United Nations.

 

   According to An AP report on November 29, 1999, in the United States, 14.5 million children - nearly one in five- experience poverty. In 1998 11.1 million children younger than 18 had no health insurance. And each year, three million American teens are infected with AIDS, HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. And about 6.4 percent of the population at or under 12 use illegal drugs.     

 

   The use of child labor is rampant in the United States. A 1997 survey based on federal government data found that 290,000 children were working illegally, 14,000 under 14 and some under nine years old, according to an article carried by Reuters on July 14, 1999.

 

   There are many children of migrant workers in the farming and horticultural sectors, where between 400 and 600 were injured and many killed annually in accidents, the article said.

 

   Children are the leading victims of the culture of violence in the United States. Many juvenile delinquents have learned to shoot people with guns through seeing films and TV and playing computer games which have violent and sexually explicit content.

 

   A 1999 survey by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) showed that in 1997, 268 out of every 100,000 juveniles were arrested for crimes involving violence, almost double the figure of 1970. A report by the U.S. Department of Justice in June of 1999 said that among all gun-related murders, nearly one-fourth were committed by young people between 18 to 20 years old, most of whom were students.

 

V. Wantonly Violating Human Rights of Other Countries

 

   In 1999, countless cases of the United States' violation of human rights of other countries were reported.

 

   In March 1999, over 400 Canadians, representing more than 1,000 victims of contaminated blood transfusions received from prisoners in the U.S., filed a class action suit in a U.S. court for compensation.

 

   Despite the fact that it was known as early as 1980 that blood transfusions from prisoners, many of whom are gays and drug addicts, might lead to AIDS, the United States continued to export the plasma to Canada, Japan, Europe and other countries.

 

   The practice has caused thousands of recipients to be infected with AIDS, hepatitis C and other diseases.

 

   Preliminary estimates show that the number of victims of the tainted plasma in North America and Caribbean Region exceeded 10,000.

 

   On April 6, 1999, a Russian newspaper, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, reported that after the attack on Pearl Harbor, over 120,000 Japanese-Americans were arrested without charges and held in remote camps in desert areas. The newspaper said the Japanese-Americans were still in prison at the end of the Second World War.

 

   On June 22, 1999, Hong Kong-based newspaper the South China Morning Post reported that during the Vietnam War, the United States sprayed 42 million liters of bio-chemicals in non-military zones in rural Vietnam, an act which still affects five million Vietnamese and has left 600,000 seriously ill.  

 

   In early October 1999, American media such as the Associated Press and Newsweek magazine, citing eyewitness accounts from American veterans and survivors, reported that in July 1950, the early period of the Korean War, U.S. troops massacred hundreds of Korean refugees, including women and children, with machine-guns in No Gun Ri. According to a report released by Reuters on October 6, 1999, an apartheid-era germ and chemical warfare campaign against blacks in South Africa was based on a U.S. government biological and chemical program.

 

   On October 25, 1999, British weekly magazine New Statesman quoted a new book about the U.S. and biological warfare by two Canadian scholars as reporting that after World War II, the United States secretly granted pardons to Japanese war criminals who participated in human biochemical weapons experiments in China, and used their experimental results to develop biochemical weapons that they later used against China and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea during the Korean War.  

 

   U.S. human rights violations have shown no sign of decreasing with the appearance of the new millennium.

 

   On January 13, 2000, Staff Sergeant Frank Ronghi, a U.S. soldier with the Kosovo peacekeeping force, was arrested and transferred to the U.S. army's central prison in Germany after he allegedly sexually assaulted and murdered a 12-year-old Kosovo girl.

 

   Following the case of three U.S. soldiers who gang-raped a Japanese girl in Okinawa in 1995, which triggered mass protests in Japan, a rape attempt of a Japanese woman by a soldier of U.S. navy in a dancing hall in Okinawa on January 14, 2000 is another example of human rights violations by U.S. troops based in other countries.

 

   The United States ranks first in military spending in the world, with the 1999 total reaching 287.9 billion U.S. dollars, about 150 percent of the combined military expenditures of the European Union, Japan, Russia and China that year. 

 

   The U.S military budget for 2000 is expected to reach 300 billion U.S. dollars, exceeding the record high of 291.1 billion U.S. dollars in the mid-1980s, when the U.S. was conducting a "Star Wars" program and a large-scale arms race against the Soviet Union. The U.S. had been the world's biggest arms supplier for the eighth consecutive year from 1991 to 1998.

 

   With its powerful military strength, the U.S. has been using its all military might to indulge in aggressive wars, violating sovereignty and human rights of other countries.

 

   The U.S. used its military force overseas more than 40 times in the 1990s.  

 

   In 1999, ignoring the international norms and bypassing the United Nations Security Council, the U.S.-led NATO forces launched 78 days of air strikes against the sovereign state of Yugoslavia, a war in the name of "avoiding humanitarian disaster," causing the

biggest humanitarian catastrophe in Europe since the end of World War II.

 

   During the war, U.S.-led NATO air forces completed 32,000 sorties and dropped 21,000 tons of bombs on Yugoslavia, equivalent to four times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, by the United States during World War II.     

 

   The bombs used by U.S.-led NATO in their aggression against Yugoslavia include cluster bombs, depleted uranium bombs and other weapons banned by international laws, and newly-developed but more destructive weapons such as electromagnetic pulse bombs and graphite bombs.

 

   More than 2,000 innocent civilians were killed and 6,000 injured in Yugoslavia during the air strikes, which also left nearly one million people homeless and more than 2 million without any sources of income.

 

   The large-scale bombing paralyzed the manufacturing facilities and infrastructure for daily life in Yugoslavia, which brought about a 33 percent increase in unemployment and pushed 20 percent of the whole population below the poverty line, leading to direct

economic losses of 600 billion U.S. dollars and producing lasting and disastrous impact on the ecological environment of Yugoslavia and Europe as a whole.  

 

   Worse still, NATO went so far as to bomb the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia, killing three Chinese journalists and seriously damaging the buildings of the embassy in a gross violation of Chinese sovereignty and human rights.

 

   The U.S. has also maintained a poor record in ratifying and observing the international conventions on human rights.

 

   The U.S. is the only country other than Somalia that has not yet joined the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and one of the few countries that have not yet signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. It has been 23 years since the U.S. signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, but it still has not ratified the covenant.

 

   The United States has refused to recognize the superiority of international laws over its domestic laws, and has made numerous statements and rationalizations regarding international conventions on human rights according to its domestic laws.

 

   As for the international conventions on human rights it has ratified or joined, the U.S. federal government has simply let its states go their own way and refused to meet the obligations to implement them nationwide. It has even failed to hand in reports of implementation on time as required, and has been ignoring the criticism and comments from other organizations under the United Nations. 

 

   The United States does not have a good human rights record of its own, but likes to play the role of the "world's human rights judge" and makes unwarranted accusations about other countries' human rights records year after year.

 

   The U.S government needs to keep an eye on its own human rights problems, mind its own business, and stop interfering in the internal affairs of other countries in the name of protecting human rights.

 

 

 

 

 

                                              27 February 2000, Beijing