Over-Emphasis on
Individual Rights 'Damages America' (People's Daily, People's Republic of
China)
Is it possible
that the United States has gone too far protecting individual civil and
political rights? As it has done for a little over a decade, timed to coincide
with America's annual report on human rights around the world, the Beijing
regime has issued its own report as a form of refutation. According to this
column from China's state-run People's
Daily, America's overemphasis of the individual has come at the expense of the
right to food and housing security, and the right to be safe from things like gun
violence.
On April 19, the U.S. State Department issued its 36th
Country Reports on Human Rights, to comment on human rights in 199 countries
and regions. Two days later, with detailed statistics and facts, China's State Council Information Office released its 2012 Human Rights Record of the United States.
By comparing America's own human rights situation with U.S.
remarks on the human rights of others, it is easy to see how obviously myopic
its perceptions are. And it is clear that this myopic view is damaging to its
own human rights conduct.
First, America has a one-sided emphasis on freedom of the individual,
ignoring impact of individual freedom on the other rights of citizens. The
proliferation of gun ownership results in 120,000 people suffering gunshot
wounds every year [30,000 dead every year]. In 2012, a bloody tragedy at a school
shooting in Auckland and similar incidents shocked the world. Yet it in the
United States, it has been difficult to achieve any progress on the issue of
gun control. The U.S. Supreme Court has recently twice ruled that state and
local government gun-control laws violated the Constitution.
Second, America's one-sided emphasis on civil and political
rights ignores protections of economic, social and cultural rights. The U.S.
government has failed to ratify the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which has been approved
by 160 counties. In the United States, more than 46 million people live below
the poverty line, and as many as 9 million are unemployed. And the United
States is one of the few developed countries that has failed to implement universal
health insurance.
Again, America over-emphasizes certain types of rights protection
and ignores others. At polling stations during the 2012 U.S.
presidential election, some Asian American voters encountered discrimination and other obstacles to
voting. In addition, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights accused the
United States of failing to ensure that Latinos and African Americans were
fully able to exercise their votes.
Third, African American unemployment is twice that of White
Americans, their median household income is less than 60 percent of Whites, and
they suffer poverty rates three times higher than Whites. The wages of U.S.
women are on average only 77 percent that of men. Meanwhile, African American
women earn only 62 percent of men, and Hispanic women only 54 percent. Muslims account
for only 1 percent of U.S. population, but suffer 14 percent of all cases of
religious discrimination cases.
Fourth, by maintaining two standards of human rights -
one for itself and the other for the rest of the world, the United States tramples
on the human rights of other peoples. Since the Cold War, most of the wars in
the world have been waged by the American military in Yemen, Afghanistan,
Pakistan and other countriesm which have resulted a huge number of deaths of innocent
civilians; creating burning humiliation where it has operated and hurt the
feelings of religious people by destroying shrines. Furthernore, by using white phosphorus
bombs and depleted uranium munitions in the Iraq War, there has been an alarming increase
in birth defects.
America has refused to comply with the
provisions of the Hague
Conventions on the rights of prisoners of war, it has detained 171
prisoners without trial at Guantanamo Bay, and has utilized a variety of forms
of torture against them. Meanwhile, the rapes of local women by
U.S. military personnel has triggered anti-American protests.
Last, the United States considers its own concept of human
rights as the only standard and its own system as the only method for protecting
human rights, thereby ignoring the differences of economy, politics, society and culture
in other countries; and disrespecting the path of development and individual methods
of protecting human rights in other countries.
By virtue of its hegemony within the international
community, the United States makes unscrupulous charges about the human rights
situation in other countries, but refuses to join the central U.N. human rights
conventions, such as Convention
on the Rights of the Child, the Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention
on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, etc. And it has refused to
recognize the rights of the vast majority of countries to development. When the
U.N. Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on the right to development last
year, the United States was the only country to vote against.
The insularity of the U.S. government on the concept of
human rights doesn't only blind it to its own human rights protection problems. By
holding itself out as the role model for human rights and arrogantly seeking to
impose its model on other countries not only hinders human rights improvement in
America, it is disastrous for the development of human rights around the world.
*Jian
Chang is assistant director of Human Rights Research Center at Nankai University
