China on Tuesday issued “The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2022.”
Following is the full text of the report:
The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2022
The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China
March 2023
Contents
Foreword
I. Dysfunctional Civil Rights Protection System
II. Hollowed-out American-style Electoral Democracy
III. Growing Racial Discrimination and Inequality
IV. Worsening Subsistence Crisis among U.S. Underclass
V. Historic Retrogression in Women’s and Children’s Rights
VI. Wanton Violation of Other Countries’ Human Rights and Trampling on Justice
Foreword
The year 2022 witnessed a landmark setback for U.S. human rights. In the United States, a country labeling itself a “human rights defender,” “chronic diseases” such as money politics, racial discrimination, gun and police violence, and wealth polarization are rampant. Human rights legislation and justice have seen an extreme retrogression, further undermining the basic rights and freedoms of the American people.
The U.S. government has greatly relaxed gun control, resulting in high death toll from gun violence. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Bruen case in 2022 became a landmark regression in the field of gun control in the United States. Nearly half of U.S. states have relaxed gun restrictions. The United States leads the world in gun ownership, gun homicide and mass shootings, with more than 80,000 people killed or injured by gun violence in 2022, the third consecutive year on record that the United States experiences more than 600 mass shootings. Gun violence has become an “American disease.”
Midterm elections have become the most expensive ones in the United States, and American-style democracy has lost its popular support. The cost of elections in the United States has soared again, with cumulative spending of the 2022 midterm elections exceeding more than 16.7 billion U.S. dollars. Political donations from billionaires accounted for 15 percent of the federal total, up from 11 percent in the 2020 election cycle. “Dark money” donations manipulate U.S. elections furtively, and political polarization and social fragmentation make it difficult for the country to reach a democratic consensus. With 69 percent of Americans believing their democracy is at “risk of collapse” and 86 percent of American voters saying it faces “very serious threats,” there is a general public disillusionment of American-style democracy.
Racism is on the rise and ethnic minorities suffer widespread discrimination. Hate crimes based on racial bias in the United States increased dramatically between 2020 and 2022. The racist massacre at a Buffalo supermarket, with 10 African-Americans killed, has shocked the world. A total of 81 percent of Asian Americans say violence against Asian communities is surging. African Americans are 2.78 times more likely to be killed by police than whites. The sufferings caused by genocide and cultural assimilation taken by the U.S. government against Indians and other aborigines in history still persist today.
Life expectancy has plummeted, and deaths from drug abuse continue to climb. According to a report released in August 2022 by the National Center for Health Statistics under the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, average life expectancy in the United States dropped by 2.7 years to 76.1 years from 2019 to 2021, the lowest since 1996. Interest groups and politicians trade power for money, allowing drug and substance abuse to flourish. The number of Americans dying from drug and substance abuse has increased dramatically in recent years, to more than 100,000 per year. Substance abuse has become one of America’s most devastating public health crises.
Women have lost constitutional protections for abortion, and children’s living environment is worrying. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade has ended women’s right to abortion protected by the U.S. Constitution for nearly 50 years, which lands a huge blow to women’s human rights and gender equality. In 2022, more than 5,800 children under the age of 18 got injured or killed by shooting in the United States, and the number of school shootings amounted to 302, the highest since 1970. The child poverty rate in the United States increased from 12.1 percent in December 2021 to 16.6 percent in May 2022, with 3.3 million more children living in poverty. The United States had seen a nearly 70 percent increase in child labor violations since 2018, and registered a 26 percent increase in minors employed in hazardous occupations in fiscal year 2022.
U.S. abuse of force and unilateral sanctions has created humanitarian disasters. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the United States has carried out military operations in 85 countries in the name of “anti-terrorism,” which directly claimed at least 929,000 civilian lives and displaced 38 million people. The United States has imposed more unilateral sanctions than any other country in the world, and it still has sanctions in place against more than 20 countries, resulting in the inability of those targeted to provide basic food and medicine for their people. Immigration issue has become a tool of partisan fight, and immigration farces have been staged on a large scale, making immigrants face extreme xenophobia and cruel treatment. There were a record high of nearly 2.4 million migrant arrests at the nation’s border in 2022, and the death toll of immigrants at its southern border reached 856, the deadliest in a single year.
The United States, founded on colonialism, racist slavery and inequality in labor, possession and distribution, has further fallen into a quagmire of system failure, governance deficits, racial divide and social unrest in recent years under the interaction of its polarized economic distribution pattern, racial conflict dominated social pattern and capital interest groups controlled political pattern.
American politicians, serving the interests of oligarchs, have gradually lost their subjective will and objective ability to respond to the basic demands of ordinary people and defend the basic rights of ordinary citizens, and failed to solve their own structural problems of human rights. Instead, they wantonly use human rights as a weapon to attack other countries, creating confrontation, division and chaos in the international community, and have thus become a spoiler and obstructor of global human rights development.
I. Dysfunctional Civil Rights Protection System
The United States is a country defined by extreme violence, where people are threatened by both violent crime and violent law enforcement, and their safety is far from being guaranteed. Prisons are overcrowded and have become a modern slavery establishment where forced labor and sexual exploitation are commonplace. America’s self-proclaimed civil rights and freedoms have become empty talk.
Collusion between politicians and businesses paralyzes the gun control agenda. U.S. gun interest groups have mounted powerful political lobbying for their own interests. In defiance of public opinion, the government has drastically relaxed gun controls, allowing guns to be carried in crowded public places such as hospitals, schools, bars and stadiums. On July 3, 2022, Bloomberg News reported that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the “Bruen case” on June 23 overturned half a century’s gun control legislation in New York and six other states. Residents of these states were allowed to make concealed carry, a landmark backward step in the field of gun control in the United States. The New York Times reported on Oct 28, 2022 that a federal court in Texas ruled that a state law banning adults under 21 from carrying handguns was unconstitutional. Nearly half of U.S. states have now relaxed gun restrictions. “The country has been moving as a whole, in the past two or three decades, very clearly and dramatically toward loosening gun-carrying laws,” said Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, a professor at the University of Washington. American scholar Pamela Haag’s book “The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture” points out that guns in the United States are an industrial chain that “begins with production line and ends with the death of victims.” “The tragedy of gun violence in America has its roots in the secular gun trade.”
Gun violence rises in tandem with gun ownership. A study published in the British Medical Journal suggests that the relaxation of gun control in the United States has led to a simultaneous rise in gun ownership and mass shootings. With less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States owns 46 percent of the world’s civilian guns. The United States leads the world in gun ownership, gun homicide, and mass shootings. According to the Gun Violence Archive website, the number of mass shootings in the United States has increased significantly in recent years. In 2022, gun violence killed 43,341 people, and injured 37,763 people, and 636 mass shootings occurred in the United States, an average of two a day. America’s firearm homicide rate is eight times higher than Canada’s, 13 times higher than France’s, and 23 times higher than Australia’s. In an opinion piece published on June 25, 2022, The Australian said that the United States “is a country all but defined by ultra-violence, in its media and on its streets.” Gun violence has become an “American disease.”
Major crimes such as murder and robbery continue to rise. The USA Today reported on Sept. 11, 2022, that in the first half of 2022, homicides in member cities of the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) increased by 50 percent and aggravated assaults by about 36 percent compared to the same period in 2019. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sept. 6, 2022 that as of September 2022, the homicide rate in New Orleans was up 141 percent, shootings up 100 percent, carjackings up 210 percent, and armed robberies up 25 percent, compared with the same period in 2019. According to a Council On Criminal Justice report on July 28, 2022, in the first half of 2022, robberies rose 19 percent and larcenies rose 20 percent in major U.S. cities. Fox News reported on July 7, 2022 that since June 2021, the overall crime in New York City increased by 31 percent, grand larceny by 41 percent, robberies by 36 percent, burglaries by nearly 34 percent, and felony assault victims increased by about 1,000 per quarter. According to a CNN report on June 8, 2022, 72 percent of Americans were dissatisfied with the country’s policies on reducing or controlling crime, and more Americans said they worried a great or fair deal about crime and violence (80 percent) than at any point in well over a decade.
Police violence gets worse. In 2022, a record 1,239 people died as a result of police violence in the United States, according to the website Mapping Police Violence. During the year, there were only 10 days when no police killing happened. Most police killings occur during routine law enforcement such as stop checks or when dealing with nonviolent crimes. Police are rarely accused of using excessive force. In police killings between 2013 and 2022, 98.1 percent of the officers involved were not charged with a crime. On June 27, 2022, police in Akron, Ohio fatally shot Jayland Walker, an unarmed 25-year-old African American, more than 90 times. According to a preliminary medical report, Walker had more than 60 wounds on his body. This was the third police shooting in Akron between December 2021 and June 2022.
The life and health of prisoners are threatened. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and prison conditions are terrible. According to a report in the Guardian on Oct. 1, 2022, nearly 500 people per 100,000 were incarcerated in the United States, which is about five times that of Britain, six times that of Canada, and nine times that of Germany. According to an article published by The Fair Justice Initiative organization on April 25, 2022, inmates in Mississippi prisons were kept in dark cells without lights or clean water, and the room temperature was often extremely hot. The Chicago Sun-Times reported on Feb. 19, 2022, that cells at the Joliet prison in Illinois were infested with rats, and rotten food and raw sewage overflowed into common areas. Prisoners’ lives are not guaranteed. According to a study published in October 2022 in Prison Legal News, a publication on inmates’ rights, a shortage of guards and inadequate infrastructure in Alabama’s prison system led to high rates of violence and deaths among inmates. There were 39 deaths in the first eight months of 2022, 30 of which were unnatural ones.
Prisons became places of modern slavery. According to a report jointly released by the University of Chicago Law School and the American Civil Liberties Union on June 16, 2022, the United States incarcerates more than 1.2 million people in state and federal prisons, about 800,000 were engaged in forced labor, accounting for 65 percent of the total number of prisoners. Over 76 percent of the prisoners surveyed said they would be punished with solitary confinement, no mitigation and loss of family visitation rights if they refused to work. Incarcerated workers were forced to provide food service, laundry, and other operations but they have few rights and protections, said a report by the Prison Policy Initiative on March 14, 2022. Besides, incarcerated workers typically earn little to no pay at all, according to a research by American Civil Liberties Union on June 15, 2022. American prisons have become veritable modern-day slavery factories.
Religious intolerance intensifies. According to the Hate Crime Statistics for 2021 released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Dec. 15, 2022, a total of 1,005 religious hate crimes were reported in the United States in 2021, of which 31.9 percent were anti-Semitic incidents, 21.3 percent were anti-Sikh incidents, and 9.5 percent were anti-Islamic incidents, 6.1 percent were anti-Catholic incidents and 6.5 percent were anti-Orthodox incidents. Intolerance of Islam in the United States has intensified, and Muslims are severely discriminated against, said a report released by the Council on American-Islamic Relations in 2022. In 2021, the Council on American-Islamic Relations received 6,720 complaints, including 308 hate and bias incidents related complaints, an increase of 28 percent over 2020; 679 law enforcement and government overreach complaints, an increase of 35 percent over 2020; 1,298 incidents of discrimination in workplaces and public places, an increase of 13 percent over 2020. The Middle East Eye reported on Aug. 23, 2022, that a study showed that Muslims are five times more likely to experience police harassment because of their religion compared to those of other faiths.
II. Hollowed-out American-style Electoral Democracy
Political donations have made American elections a game for the rich, alienation of two-party politics has turned into polarized politics, and American democracy is losing its foundation in public support. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter once said political bribery has tainted the U.S. political system. “It’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being at the essence of getting the nominations for President, or to elect the President,” Carter said.
Money in elections has set a new record. American elections are at the heart of its democracy, powered by money. Election costs have soared since donation limits were lifted in 2010 and again in 2014. According to an analysis published by OpenSecrets, the total cost of the 2022 state and federal midterm elections was nearly 17 billion dollars, the most expensive election in history. Federal candidates and political committees spent 8.9 billion dollars, while state candidates, party committees, and ballot measure committees spent 7.8 billion dollars, both of which set all-time records. CNN reported on Dec. 8, 2022, that the five most expensive Senate races of 2022 have seen nearly 1.3 billion dollars in spending across the primary and general elections. Leading the way is the Pennsylvania Senate race, where nearly 375 million dollars have been spent on the race this cycle.
Political donations create an oligarchy. U.S. politics has been kidnapped by capital and there is a stable “money-return” relationship. “Of the people, by the people, for the people” has become “of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, and for the 1 percent,” as the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement says: “We are the 99 percent, but controlled by the 1 percent.” Helene Landemore, a political theorist at Yale University, wrote in an article published by the Foreign Policy magazine in December 2021 that American democracy lacks “people’s power,” and that only the very rich, a very small part of the population, can use their very high economic status to push for a set of policy priorities that serve themselves.
“American billionaires spent a whopping 880 million dollars on the elections by the end of October, with the final total likely approaching an astronomical 1 billion dollars. That’s a game-changing amount of money that undoubtedly influenced the electoral outcomes we are now seeing,” Fortune magazine wrote on Dec. 9, 2022, in a report, titled “Billionaires had an extra 1 trillion dollars to influence the midterm elections. Save American democracy by taxing extreme wealth.”
Billionaire wealth has been, as Americans for Tax Fairness Executive Director Frank Clemente put it, “drowning our democracy,” the magazine reported. Billionaires made up 15 percent of all federal political itemized donations from Jan. 1, 2021, to Sept. 30, 2022, up from 11 percent in the 2020 election cycle, Reuters reported on Nov. 9, 2022, adding that Financier George Soros was the top individual donor, spending more than 128 million dollars to support Democratic campaigns. With plutocrats using their money to control the outcome of elections, U.S. elections are increasingly out of line with the nature of democracy.
Dark money donations secretly manipulate the direction of elections. Dark money has been invisibly influencing U.S. elections. The Brennan Center for Justice reported on Nov. 16, 2022, that four party-aligned dark money groups pumped almost 300 million dollars into this election cycle by giving to sister super political action committees (PACs) or buying cleverly worded ads. There are hundreds more politically active groups pouring secret money into the elections.
A billionaire secretly transferred 1.6 billion dollars to a Republican political group, the largest known political advocacy donation in American history, according to a report titled “Billions in ‘dark money’ is influencing US politics” by the Guardian on Aug. 29, 2022. In 2020 alone, more than 1-billion-dollar worth of dark money flooded around weak disclosure rules and into America’s elections. Heading into the 2022 election, the situation is getting worse. The two parties’ major Senate and House Super PACs are all being funded by anonymous dark money groups that are not required to disclose their donors. Dark money has secretly captured the U.S. political parties and government, and the majority of voters have become tools of political games.
Multiple tactics and manipulation of election results. Many Americans have completely abandoned the idea of equality, and it is often these people who reject the idea of equality who set the rules that others have to follow, said J. R. Pole in his book titled “The Pursuit of Equality in American History.” Laws restricting voters’ eligibility to vote are frequently introduced. According to the study published by the Brennan Center for Justice on May 26, 2022, 18 states passed 34 restrictive laws in 2021. For the 2022 legislative session, lawmakers in 39 states have considered at least 393 restrictive bills, which have disproportionately affected voters of color by setting up a series of voting obstacles. As many as 200,000 voters could be at risk of having their registrations canceled after Arizona enacted a law regulating the provision of documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration. On Aug. 4, 2022, the Global Organization Against Hate and Extremism published a report titled “Americans’ Fears Suppressing Participation in Democracy,” which said that 40 percent of Black people and 37 percent of Hispanic people very worried being denied the ability to cast a ballot. Strict voting eligibility laws blocked nearly 16 percent of Mississippi’s Black voting-age population from casting a ballot. Mississippi has one of the highest concentrations of Black people in the country, yet has not elected a Black person to statewide office in well over a century, reported The Guardian on its website in an article entitled “The racist 1890 law that’s still blocking thousands of Black Americans from voting” on Jan. 8, 2022. The National Urban League’s release of the “2022 State of Black America: Under Siege the Plot to Destroy Democracy” on April 12, 2022, showed that in 2021 alone, 20 states have leveraged census data to redraw congressional maps. These means of manipulating elections have deprived a large number of voters of their voting eligibility, leaving equal voting rights to exist on paper only.
American elections are accompanied by violence and intimidation. Its political history has not been short of violence and terror. Historically, groups such as the notorious Ku Klux Klan prevented African Americans from voting through violence such as beatings, lynchings, and assassinations, creating a sense of fear that continues to this day.
Voters may face intimidation at the polls and beyond from vigilante actors, the Brennan Center for Justice said in a report released on Oct. 28, 2022, adding that in Arizona, right-wing extremist groups have recruited volunteers to monitor drop boxes, some of whom often showed up armed and in tactical gear.
The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism said in a report on Aug. 4, 2022, that there is a growing sense of fear among Americans, with minorities particularly concerned about security at the polls and voters generally worried about safety at polling stations. Overall, 63 percent of those surveyed said they are “very worried” about such things as violence, harassment, and intimidation happening at their polling place. The psychological shadow of lynching and the atmosphere of fear became a great obstacle for voters to exercise their right to vote.
Two-party politics has become a polarized one. Political polarization, especially the polarization of two-party politics, has been one of the most striking features of American politics in the past three decades. The widening ideological divide and opposition between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have expanded the tear in American society and led to the idling of American politics.
Around 28 percent of Americans named “political extremism or polarization” as one of the most important issues facing the country, according to a survey by the U.S. poll tracker FiveThirtyEight on June 14, 2022, adding that 64 percent said they felt political polarization is mostly driven by political and social elites.
According to a report by NBC NEWS on Oct. 23, 2022, 81 percent of Democrats said they believe the Republican Party’s agenda poses a threat that, if it isn’t stopped, will destroy America, while 79 percent of Republicans believe the same of the Democratic Party’s agenda. Seventy-one percent of voters said the country is headed in the wrong direction. “It seems like voters are no longer looking for a ‘Contract with America.’ They want a divorce,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates.
Political polarization and social rifts have made it difficult to reach a democratic consensus, and election farce and post-election chaos have become prominent features of U.S. politics. The polarization of party contention and vicious rivalry has led to the collapse of political trust and brought serious governance crisis to the United States, wrote Marc J. Hetherington, professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, and Thomas J. Rudolph, professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois, in their book, titled “Why Washington Won’t Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis.”
Government officials take advantage of their positions for personal gain. High-level politicians can in advance get access to a lot of sensitive information that could allow them to make profits. The reported net assets of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with her husband Paul Pelosi, are worth more than 114 million U.S. dollars, and a majority of their wealth is derived from investments such as stocks and options, The Hill said in an opinion piece on July 24, 2022. In March 2021, Paul exercised options to purchase 25,000 Microsoft shares worth more than 5 million dollars. Less than two weeks later, the U.S. Army disclosed a 21.9-billion dollar deal with Microsoft. Shares of the company rose sharply after the deal was announced. In June 2022, Paul bought up to 5 million dollars in stock options from Nvidia, a leading semiconductor company. The purchase came as Congress was set to vote on legislation that would result in 52 billion dollars in subsidies allocated to elevate the chip-production industry. During Nancy Pelosi’s term as the house speaker, the Pelosis have made approximately 30 million dollars from trades involving big tech companies the former House speaker is responsible for regulating. Of the 435 House members, 183 traded stocks through themselves or their immediate family members from 2019 to 2021, Daily Mail said in an opinion piece on Sept. 13, 2022. It added that at least 97 bought or sold stocks, bonds, or other financial assets through themselves or their spouses that directly intersected with their congressional work. A Wall Street Journal investigation on Oct. 11, 2022, found that more than 2,600 officials at agencies from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department disclosed stock investments in companies while those same companies were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies. In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, former Pennsylvania judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted 2.8 million dollars in illegal payments from two for-profit lockups, The Associated Press (AP) reported on Aug. 18, 2022. Ciavarella pushed a zero-tolerance policy that guaranteed large numbers of kids would be sent to the facilities, the report added. Many top U.S. politicians were making empty promises to voters while profiting financially from their positions.
Public confidence in American democracy continues to decline. American scholars Thomas R. Dye, Harmon Zeigler and Louis Schubert pointed out in their book The Irony of Democracy: An Uncommon Introduction to American Politics that few Americans today still believe that government is run for the benefit of the people. Most see the political system as run by a few big interests for their own benefit, leaving the average person forgotten behind, the book added. Sixty-seven percent of Americans think the nation’s democracy is in danger of collapse, said a poll by The Quinnipiac University Poll on Aug. 31, 2022. AP said in a report on Oct. 19, 2022, that there is a general despair over democracy in America which comes after decades of increasing polarization nationwide. Just 9 percent of U.S. adults think democracy is working “extremely” or “very well,” while 52 percent say it’s not working well, it added. PR Newswire reported on Nov. 4, 2022, that a nonpartisan More Perfect poll before the midterm election showed that 86 percent of voters said the U.S. democracy faces very serious threats. Seventy-two percent of American voters rated the health of American democracy as poor; 64 percent said there is too much money in politics; 61 percent believed U.S. politics is corrupt; and 58 percent thought there is too much-biased information and misinformation in American democracy. According to a survey by NBC News on Nov. 9, 2022, 72 percent of Democratic voters, 68 percent of Republican voters and 70 percent of independents agreed that democracy was threatened. Public confidence in American democracy continues to decline, reflecting that American democracy is losing popular support.
III. Growing Racial Discrimination and Inequality
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said in the Concluding observations on the combined tenth to twelfth reports of the United States of America released on Sept. 21, 2022, that the lingering legacies of colonialism and slavery continue to fuel racism and racial discrimination around the country.
In recent years, hate crimes and hate speech incidents in the United States have increased significantly, the number of race-related gun injuries and deaths has jumped substantially, and people of color and ethnic minorities continue to face systematic discrimination in medical care, education, housing and other fields, the agency said.
Racial discrimination is widespread. Racial inferiority and superiority complexes are deeply embedded in U.S. systems and have become “inextricable.” Interviews with more than 3,000 African Americans showed that 82 percent of them considered racism a major problem for African descendants in the United States, while 79 percent reported having experienced discrimination because of their race or ethnicity, and 68 percent said racial discrimination is the main reason why many Black people can’t get ahead, CNN reported on Aug. 30, 2022. According to a survey published by the Ipsos group on March 29, 2022, 65 percent of the Latino Americans surveyed reported having experienced racist comments in the past year. According to a report released by the U.S. National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum on March 30, 2022, 74 percent of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander women reported experiencing racism and/or discrimination over the past 12 months, with 53 percent reporting the perpetrator was a stranger and 47 percent reporting the incidents took place in public places such as restaurants and shopping centers.
Racial hate crimes remain high. Fifteen major U.S. cities saw a double-digit growth in hate crimes between 2020 and 2021, and an increase of about 5 percent in bias-motivated incidents till August 2022, according to a study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. In an article titled “Hate crime reports surge” published on Oct. 21, 2022, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that as of Oct. 18 that year, the Chicago Police Department had received reports of 120 hate crimes. On May 14, 2022, Payton Gendron, a 19-year-old White gunman, killed 10 African Americans and wounded three others in a racist massacre at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The killer also videotaped the attack for live streaming. According to a report published in February 2023 by the Anti-Defamation League based in the United States, the number of U.S. mass killings spiked over the past decade, and all extremist killings identified in 2022 were linked to right-wing extremism, with an especially high number linked to white supremacy. “It is not an exaggeration to say that we live in an age of extremist mass killings.”
Rampant hate crimes against Asian Americans. A report issued by the non-profit organization Stop AAPI Hate shows that it received reports of nearly 11,500 hate incidents between March 19, 2020, and March 31, 2022. An online poll by the research firm AAPI Data found that one in six Asian Americans nationwide experienced race-based violence in 2021, the Los Angeles Times reported on March 22, 2022. The New York Times reported on March 14, 2022 that a 28-year-old man was charged with hate crimes in connection with a two-hour spree of attacks on seven women of Asian descent in Manhattan, and four Asian New Yorkers had died in recent months after being attacked. CNN reported on Nov. 30, 2022 that in Yonkers, a man punched an elderly Asian woman more than 100 times, hurled racist abuse at her, stomped on her body repeatedly and spat on her. The Houston Public Media reported on Aug. 22, 2022 multiple attacks on people of Asian descent in San Francisco. One of the victims, Amy Li, said that she still sees the offender in her neighborhood almost every day. “I’ve reported this case to the police and haven’t heard anything … Every day my son and I live in fear.”
Fifty-seven percent of Asian Americans said they often or sometimes felt unsafe in public places because of their race or ethnicity, 81 percent of the group agreed that violence against the Asian American community was on the rise, and 73 percent said violence posed more of a threat now than it did before the pandemic, according to a report published on the medical magazine Health Affairs on April 12, 2022. According to the testimony of Erika Lee, regents professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota on Discrimination and Violence Against Asian Americans before a U.S. congressional hearing, “As shocking as these incidents are, it is vital to understand that they are not random acts perpetrated by deranged individuals. They are an expression of our country’s long history of systemic racism and racial violence targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.”
Entrenched racial discrimination in law enforcement and justice. A concluding report of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination revealed that it still widely persists in the United States that law enforcement officials use excessive violence against people of color and minority groups and get impunity. Statistics from the Mapping Police Violence website show that in police killings between 2013 and 2022, Black Americans were 2.78 times more likely to be killed by police than white people, and unarmed Black Americans were 1.3 times more likely to be killed by police than whites. In Boston, Minneapolis and Chicago, Blacks are over 20 times more likely than whites to be killed by police. Citing a report from the National Registry of Exonerations, National Public Radio (NPR) reported on Sept. 27, 2022 that Black people represent under 14 percent of the U.S. population, but they account for 53 percent of those who were falsely convicted of a serious crime and then freed after serving at least part of their sentence. Black Americans are about seven times more likely than white people to be wrongfully convicted of three major crimes, and Black people were 19 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of drug crimes, it added. The criminal justice system permeated with racism “is increasingly serving as a major gateway to a much larger system of stigmatization and long-term marginalization,” noted the book published by the National Academies Press, The growth of incarceration in the United States: Exploring causes and consequences.
Widening racial wealth gap. Workers of color have long been forced to do literally “dirty laundry” due to the racist barriers they face in employment. CNN reported on Aug. 30, 2022 that two-thirds of Black Americans said that the recent increased focus on race and racial inequality in the United States had not led to changes that are improving the lives of Black people. A recent long-term study, co-released by researchers from Princeton University and University of Bonn, found that the racial wealth gap is the largest of the economic disparities between Black and white Americans, with a white-to-Black per capita wealth ratio of 6 to 1. The racial wealth convergence between Blacks and whites after the abolition of slavery followed an even slower path and then had stalled by the 1950s. Since the 1980s, the wealth gap has widened again as capital gains have predominantly benefited white households. In 2021, 19.5 percent of Black people living in the United States were living below the poverty line, compared to 8.2 percent of white people, Statista Research Department said in a report on Sept. 30, 2022. More than half of Black and Latino households and over two-thirds of Native American ones reported the recent price increases driven by inflation had caused them serious financial problems, according to a national poll jointly released by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on Aug. 8, 2022. The impact of inflation on Black Americans is “extremely devastating,” said professor William Darity Jr. at Duke University. “People will have to make very, very hard decisions about whether or not to purchase medicines or buy food or forgo payment of their utilities.”
Discrimination in housing policies. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said in its concluding observations that there is a high degree of residential racial segregation, persistent policy and legal discrimination in access to housing on the grounds of race, color and national or ethnic origin. The gap between white and Black homeownership rates in the United States is at its widest in 120 years, according to a BBC report on July 10, 2022. Some 19.4 percent of Black applicants were denied a mortgage in 2021, compared with 10.8 percent of white applicants, according to the property firm Zillow. For many Black homeowners, interest rates are already often higher than their white counterparts regardless of income, The Hill quoted a 2021 Harvard University study as saying on Aug. 28, 2022. Just 45.3 percent of Black households and 48.3 percent of Hispanic households owned their homes during the second quarter of 2022, compared to 74.6 percent of white households, it added.
Severe racial inequality in health services. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said in its concluding observations that racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected by higher rates of maternal mortality and morbidity. Ethnic and racial disparities in maternal mortality rate increased significantly. The rate rose markedly for non-Hispanic Black women in 2020, 2.9 times as non-Hispanic white women, according to a report published by National Center for Health Statistics on Feb. 23, 2022. Study showed racial and ethnic disparities persist in outpatient COVID-19 treatment among Black, Hispanic and Native American patients, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report published on Oct. 28, 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused disproportionate impact on racial and ethnic minority groups, it said. Inequitable health services affect minority patients’ right to life. Hispanic populations in California lost 5.7 years of life expectancy between 2019 and 2021. Black populations lost 3.8 years, and Asian populations lost 3 years, while white populations lost 1.9 years, according to a study by Princeton School of Public and International Affairs published on July 7, 2022.
American Indians have not seen their misery alleviated. “The first root of America was the colonial genocide of its indigenous peoples. This root remains a fundamental pillar of American society and permeates American culture.” The U.S. Department of Interior released the first part of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative on May 11, 2022. It admits past efforts by the federal government to assimilate Native American children into white American society by separating them from their families and stripping them of their languages and cultures.
The review notes that from 1819 to 1969, there were 408 federal schools in 37 states. Children and teenagers at these schools were subject to systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies by the federal government, including getting English names, haircuts, and being banned from using their native languages and exercising their religions. The initial investigation found that 19 boarding schools accounted for the deaths of more than 500 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children. The number of recorded deaths is expected to increase to tens of thousands as the investigation gets underway.
It was a genocide, said Marsha Small, a northern Cheyenne researcher.
Donald Neconie, a Native American tribal elder who was once student at a government-backed Indian boarding school, testified about the hardships he endured, including beatings, whippings, sexual assaults, forced haircuts and painful nicknames. Neconie recalled being beaten if he spoke his native Kiowa language, “Every time I tried to talk Kiowa, they put lye in my mouth.” “It was 12 years of hell,” he said. “I will never, ever forgive this school for what they did to me.”
Misery that American Indians endured historically persists through today. Minority households reported the price increases driven by inflation had caused them “serious financial problems.” It’s even higher among Native Americans, with that number rising to more than two-thirds of those surveyed, according to an NPR report on Aug. 8, 2022.
A U.S. CDC report analyzed maternal deaths for American Indian and Alaska Native people who are more than twice as likely as white mothers to die of pregnancy-related causes but often undercounted in health data due to misclassification, according to a report released by USA Today on Sept. 19, 2022. More than 90 percent of indigenous mothers’ deaths were preventable, according to the analysis. “In both African American and Native Americans, we see this historic and unfortunate, constant disparity in outcomes,” said Dr Andrea Jackson, division chief of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco.
IV. Worsening Subsistence Crisis among U.S. Underclass
The nation sees widening wealth gap, worsening living conditions for low-income groups, increasing homeless people, life-threatening drug abuse, and dropping average life expectancy. U.S. underclass is facing a severe survival crisis.
Wealth gap has further widened. The United States is a poor society with many super riches. Through an in-depth analysis of the U.S. society, the New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream?, demonstrates the wide range of inequalities based on class, gender and race in the United States. Co-authored by Earl Wysong, professor of sociology at Indiana University Kokomo, Robert Perrucci, professor of sociology at Purdue University, and David Wright, professor of sociology at Wichita State University, the fourth edition of this book shows that a new polarized double-diamond social structure has emerged, featuring a privileged class, consisting of the top 20 percent of the population who are wealthy, and a new working class, consisting of 80 percent of the population who live at the bottom of society and are getting increasingly poor and unstable. According to data published by Statista Research Department, Sept. 30, 2022, the Gini coefficient in the United States rose to a record high of 0.49 in 2021, as the poverty rate rose for the second year in a row with 37.9 million people living in poverty. The U.S. Federal Reserve statistics show that the total wealth of the richest 1 percent of the U.S. population reached a record 45.9 trillion U.S. dollars at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021 and their fortunes have increased by more than 12 trillion dollars, or more than a third, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Of the approximately 1.7 trillion dollars in excess savings held by American families as of mid-2022, about 1.35 trillion dollars was held by the top half of earners, while just 350 billion dollars by the bottom half.
Inflation continues to hurt low-income households. While U.S. residents’ savings have run down, necessities like car repair, food and housing become sharply more expensive, The New York Times reported on Nov. 25, 2022. At the same time, prices climbed 7.7 percent in the year through October, having the most severe negative impact on low-income groups. Lael Brainard, a governor of the Federal Reserve, said that low-income households spend 77 percent of their income on necessities, compared to only 31 percent by higher-income households. An analysis released by National Energy Assistance Directors Association on April 12, 2022, showed that for low and moderate income families, which make up the bottom 40 percent of households in the U.S. society, sharp rises in energy prices would force many of them out of basic goods and services due to extra energy bills.
The homeless has dramatically increased. According to the 2022 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report released by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, over 580,000 Americans experienced homeless on a single night in 2022, with 40 percent of them living in unsheltered locations such as on the street, in abandoned buildings, or in other places not suitable for human habitation. Over the past three years, the number of people of no fixed abode increased by at least 22,500 to 173,800 in California. However, the state only provides about 5,000 beds for the homeless, down from a maximum of more than 16,000 rooms in August 2020, according to the state Department of Social Services. The Los Angeles Times reported on December 21, 2022, that the number of the homeless in Long Beach, California, increased dramatically by 62 percent from that of 2020, including 1,282 chronically homeless people with disabilities.
According to a research published in the California Law Review by Sara K. Rankin, a professor at School of Law of Seattle University and the founder and director of the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project, homeless people in the United States are usually the “marginalized groups, such as refugees, people of color, and poor people” who are subjected to persecution, detention, incarceration, or segregation that prevents them from integrating into their communities. This exposes the systemic discrimination that exists in the United States.
Average life expectancy has significantly declined. A report released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics in August 2022 showed that U.S. life expectancy fell by a total of 2.7 years between 2019 and 2021 to 76.1 years, the lowest it has been since 1996. Non-Hispanic Native American and Alaska Native peoples saw the biggest decline — a staggering 6.6 years. Dramatic declines in life expectancy are rare in peacetime. Data released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that, as of Dec. 29, 2022, the United States reported more than 1.08 million COVID-19 deaths, including more than 260,000 in 2022. While U.S. politicians are tight-lipped about the country’s average life expectancy, it is probably the most important measure in assessing how good life is in a country and even, to some extent, how great a country is, reported German newspaper Die Welt on Jan. 15, 2023. In addition to the COVID-19 pandemic, the causes of the dramatic decline in life expectancy in the United States include drug abuse, gun violence and etc. According to a joint study published in the British Medical Journal by scholars from Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Colorado Boulder, and Urban Institute, the deteriorating health situation, high mortality rates and continued injustice against minorities in the United States are largely the product of long-term policy choices and systemic racism. The mass mortality of COVID-19 reflects not only inappropriate U.S. policy choices in response to the pandemic, but also the deep-rooted causes of the deteriorating health situation in the United States over the past decades.
The U.S. government actively promotes the legalization of marijuana regardless of people’s health. Marijuana is a controlled narcotic drug by the UN International Drug Control Conventions. In the 1970s, the United States promulgated the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), which classified marijuana as a federally controlled substance. The federal and state governments of the United States have failed to regulate drugs and substance abuse and even pushed for the legalization of marijuana under the influence of lobbyists groups, resulting in more and more young people becoming victims. In their book Can Legal Weed Win? The Blunt Realities of Cannabis Economics published in 2022, Robin Goldstein and Daniel Sumner, researchers with the University of California, Davis, underlined that one of the pipe dreams behind the legalization push is the intention to make legal cannabis a new cash cow for the government through tax. Marijuana sales in the United States have exceeded 30 billion dollars so far, and the U.S. marijuana market is expected to reach 65 billion dollars by 2030. According to the data released by Open Secrets, from 2018 to 2021, some marijuana and products-related enterprises and trade associations in the United States spent more than 16.6 million dollars on political lobbying, with an average annual expenditure of about 10 times that of 2016; In the first three quarters of 2022, more than 5.6 million dollars were spent on marijuana lobbying. Enterprises and organizations profiting from marijuana trade money for power, and form interest groups with politicians, thereby letting drugs and substance abuse going unchecked, a striking demonstration of Washington’s failure in social governance.
Drugs and substance abuse endanger life and health. According to a survey released by U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 59.3 million Americans over 12 years of age abused drugs in 2020, of which 49.6 million smoked marijuana. According to public information on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly 40 percent of American high school students use marijuana for a long time. According to a report released by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in August 2022, 43 percent of young Americans have smoked marijuana in a year, 8 percent have used hallucinogens, and 11 percent have smoked marijuana every day, the highest level in record. According to a study released by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Studies on August 4, 2022, the number of Americans dying from drugs and drug abuse has increased dramatically in recent years, by more than 100,000 per year. More than 107,000 cases involving deaths from drug overdose occurred in the 12-month period ending in August 2022, according to data from the U.S. CDC. Marta Sokolowska, the Deputy Center Director for Substance Use and Behavioral Health in FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, pointed out that drug abuse has become one of the most devastating public health crises in the United States.
The absence of governance endangers environmental rights. The American Broadcasting Company reported on June 21, 2022, that in Louisiana, a large amount of industrial waste has led to many “cancer alleys” along the Mississippi River, which has a 95-percent higher risk of cancer due to air pollution than the rest of the country. The Chicago Tribune reported on July 13, 2022, that at least one per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substance, known as forever chemicals, that may be harmful to health was detected in the drinking water of more than 8 million residents in Illinois, accounting for about 60 percent of the local population. In the context of the deteriorating environmental situation, the United States Supreme Court ruled in June 2022 that the Environmental Protection Agency had no right to regulate carbon emissions without authorization from Congress, nor could it require power plants to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Stephane Dujarric, a spokesperson for the United Nations, pointed out that the ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States was “a setback in our fight against climate change.”
V. Historic Retrogression in Women’s and Children’s Rights
In 2022, a major setback occurred in the protection of the rights of women and children in the United States. Women’s right to abortion lost constitutional protection. Sexual assaults in schools, the military, and prisons continued to be high. Children’s lives and legal rights were facing serious threats.
Banning abortion violates women’s rights. In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey that guaranteed women’s abortion rights. It ended nearly 50 years of constitutionally protected abortion rights and would lead to a ban on abortion in about half of the states. Reuters reported on Dec. 1, 2022 that Indiana’s attorney general asked the state’s medical board to discipline an Indiana doctor who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio as Ohio banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. BBC reported on June 29, 2022, that U.S. Health Secretary Xavier Becerra said: “It is hard to believe that America is taking a backseat, is backsliding, when the rest of the world is moving to give women the kinds of rights they should have had a long time ago.” Michelle Bachelet, then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, pointed out on June 24, 2022, that the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion is “a huge blow to women’s human rights and gender equality.” The ruling “represents a major setback after five decades of protection for sexual and reproductive health and rights in the U.S. through Roe v Wade.”
Sexual assaults of women are shocking. One in five female students in the United States said they had been sexually assaulted in college, and the trauma affected their entire educational experience. CNN reported on Sept. 1, 2022 that reports of sexual assaults in the U.S. military spiked 13 percent in 2021, with nearly a quarter of female soldiers saying they had been sexually assaulted in the military and more than half saying they had been sexually harassed. The United States Senate issued an investigation report on Dec. 13, 2022, saying that over the past decade, cases of sexual assault on female prisoners by prison administrators happened in more than two-thirds of federal prisons, with 5,415 cases filed by U.S. prison authorities. The Associated Press reported on Feb. 6, 2022 that in 2020 there were 422 complaints against prison administrators for sexually assaulting prisoners. A federal women’s prison in Dublin, California, has been dubbed a “rape club,” where inmates say they have been subjected to rampant sexual assaults by correctional officers and even the warden.
Rampant gun violence threatens the lives of children. The Kaiser Family Foundation issued a report on Oct. 14, 2022, saying that from 2011 to 2021, nearly 18,500 children aged 17 and under were killed by gun violence in the United States. In 2021, an average of seven children were killed by shootings per day. The Washington Post reported on Dec. 11, 2022 that in 2022, more than 5,800 children under the age of 18 were injured or killed by shootings in the United States. As of Dec. 1, 2022, fatal gun shootings involving children had more than doubled from 2021, and non-fatal gun shootings involving children had also increased by 80 percent. In June 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden publicly admitted that “guns are the number one killer of children in the United States of America. The number one killer. More than car accidents. More than cancer. “
School shootings continue to rise. The United States is the country with the most frequent school shootings in the world. According to the “K-12 School Shooting Database,” the number of school shootings in the U.S. in 2022 was 302, the highest since 1970; The number of casualties reached 332, the highest in the past five years. On May 24, 2022, a serious mass shooting occurred at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. An 18-year-old high school student entered the campus with an AR-15-style rifle purchased at a sporting goods store and killed 19 students and two teachers. The shooting is regarded as the deadliest after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012. In his remarks on the incident, U.S. President Joe Biden admitted that since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting a decade ago, there had been over 900 shooting incidents reported on school grounds. “What struck me was these kinds of mass shootings rarely happen anywhere else in the world,” he said. The Washington Post reported on May 28, 2022, that the “K-12 School Shooting Database” had recorded more than 2,500 instances of threats to carry out school shootings since 2018. According to a report by BBC on May 25, 2022, Cheryl Lero Jonson, an American expert on school shootings, pointed out that young Americans today have become the “mass shooting generation.”
Child poverty rates are disproportionately high. According to the data released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Sept. 13, 2022, the national poverty rate in the United States in 2021 was 12.8 percent, and the child poverty rate was 16.9 percent. In the states of Mississippi and Louisiana, as well as Washington, D.C., child poverty rates stood as high as 27.7 percent, 26.9 percent and 23.9 percent, respectively. Research by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University pointed out that the child poverty rate in the United States rose from 12.1 percent in December 2021 to 16.6 percent in May 2022, representing 3.3 million additional children in poverty. The book “Invisible Americans: The tragic cost of child poverty” by U.S. columnist Jeff Madrick points out that the United States is a country with historically biased attitudes toward poverty, which can’t even agree on how many poor Americans are there, let alone reducing the number of poor people and poor children; If measured by a fairer and newer standard, the real number of poor people in the United States is about 60 million, and that of poor children may exceed 20 million. “Child poverty in the U.S. is a disgrace.”
Illegal use of child labor persists despite repeated prohibition. According to the figures estimated by the National Center for Farmworker Health, a U.S. non-profit organization, between 300,000 and 800,000 minors were employed on farms in the United States. The Slate Magazine pointed out that fast-food employers have committed a raft of child labor violations, making teenagers work excessive hours that violate limits protecting children’s health and education. Constant banning of child labor ends in failure, with the root cause lying in the loopholes in the U.S. legal system. Affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the supply chain crisis, the United States has been suffering labor shortages. Many states passed new bills to extend the working hours for minors. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, millions of U.S. teens were employed in agriculture, food service, retail, entertainment and construction industries in 2022. According to the Reuters’ report published on Feb. 28, 2023, the issue of illegal employment of minors has become increasingly serious, where it had seen a nearly 70 percent increase in child labor violations since 2018. According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor, in the last fiscal year, 835 companies were found to have violated child labor laws by employing 3,800 minors, and there has been a 26 percent increase in employment of minors in hazardous occupations. The USA Today reported on Nov. 13, 2022 that a Wisconsin industrial cleaning company is accused of illegally employing more than 30 children, ages 13-17, as cleaners in meatpacking plants and farms. Several underage employees were injured on the job, including a 13-year-old burned by caustic cleaning chemicals. Reuters reported on Dec. 16, 2022 that at least four major suppliers of automobile companies have employed child labor at Alabama factories, and staffing agencies supplied those immigrant minors to work in plants. Today, the United States is still the only country among the 193 member states of the United Nations that has not put its signature on the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The prospects for solving its problem of child labor remain dim.
Conditions of juvenile detention centers are harsh. The Houston Chronicle reported on Aug. 23, 2022 that conditions are poor in the juvenile detention center located in Gatesville, Texas. Teens serving sentences for serious crimes are being locked alone in poky cells for 23 hours a day. Instead of bathroom breaks, they’re given empty water bottles in which to relieve themselves. Sports programs and other activities designed to rehabilitate and redirect the troubled young people have been eliminated. Instead of attending class, they get work packets to complete in their cells, which denied their access to counseling and therapy. The Los Angeles Times reported on Nov. 29, 2022 that the juvenile detention system in Los Angeles County was in chaos. The staffing crisis in juvenile detention centers has led to frequent incidents of young detainees’ conflicts and violent corrections by prison guards. The increased isolation, lack of supportive structure and violence are having detrimental effects on incarcerated youths’ mental health. One incarcerated minor said he didn’t feel he was being “treated like a human being.”
VI. Wanton Violation of Other Countries’ Human Rights and Trampling on Justice
American scholar John Mearsheimer points out that under the “liberal hegemony” policy, the United States tends to constantly provoke wars, which increases conflicts in the international system and creates instability. “These armed conflicts usually end up failing, sometimes disastrously, and mainly at the expense of the state purportedly being rescued by the liberal goliath.” The United States pursues power politics in the international community, frequently uses force, provokes “proxy wars,” indiscriminately imposes unilateral sanctions, seriously violates the rights of immigrants and refuses to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, thus becoming a saboteur of global peace and development and a stumbling block to human rights progress.
Overseas military operations have caused humanitarian catastrophes. On Dec. 20, 2022, non-profit U.S. media outlet Common Dreams pointed out in an article titled “Warren, Jacobs Accuse Pentagon of Vastly Undercounting Civilians Killed by US Military” that according to data from the UK-based monitor group Airwars, U.S. airstrikes alone have killed as many as 48,000 civilians in nearly 100,000 bombings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen since 2001. According to data released by the Costs of War project at Brown University, since the 21st century, the U.S. government undertook what it labeled “counterterrorism” activities in 85 countries, directly killing at least 929,000 people and displacing 38 million people. And the U.S. military operations around the world have violated freedom and human rights of people in the United States and other countries. A woman and two children were killed in U.S. drone strikes in the Al-Hadba area of Al-Wadi, Yemen, on Nov. 30, 2022. “… the violence that characterizes the modern United States at home and in its conduct overseas — from the prevalence of gun — related deaths to the controversies over preemptive military action and drone strikes.”
Provoking “proxy wars” behind the scenes. In order to pursue its own interests, the United States was the one behind the scenes to provoke wars in other countries and regions. Colm Quinn, a staff writer at Foreign Policy, published an article on July 14, 2022, saying that U.S. operations are no longer confined to the Middle East, but have broadened in geographic scope, only more covertly. Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, described it as “light footprint warfare.” Under a program known as 127e, U.S. special operation forces are authorized to train proxy forces to carry out U.S. missions abroad. Foreign militants have access to U.S. arming, training, and intelligence support and are dispatched on U.S.-led missions against U.S. enemies and toward U.S. objectives. From 2017 to 2020, the Pentagon launched 23 “proxy wars” under the name of 127e in the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. At least a dozen countries have participated in the operations targeting Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Tunisia, Cameroon, Libya, and others.
Long-term arbitrary imposition of unilateral sanctions. In recent years, the unilateral sanctions imposed by the United States on other countries have increased exponentially, which has greatly weakened the capacity and level of human rights protection of the sanctioned countries. Bangladeshi newspaper The Daily Star reported on Dec. 28, 2022 that the United States, the most prolific enforcer of unilateral sanctions in the world, currently has sanctions in place against more than 20 countries, including Cuba since 1962, Iran since 1979, Syria since 2011 and Afghanistan in recent years. Many of them are unable to provide essential food and medicines to their populations. The Washington Post reported on June 13, 2022, that nearly half of all Afghans do not have enough to eat, and childhood malnutrition is on the rise. On Dec. 20, 2022, several independent experts of the UN Human Rights Council issued a joint statement that the U.S. sanctions against Iran contribute to environmental harm in Iran, prevent all people in Iran from fully enjoying their rights to health and life and violate Iranian people’s rights to clean environment. On Nov. 10, 2022, Alena Douhan, UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of the unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, stated that unilateral sanctions have exacerbated the suffering of the Syrian people and constitute a grave violation of human rights. The U.S. wanton imposition of sanctions has triggered human rights crises in other countries, which has been strongly condemned by the international community. On Nov. 3, 2022, the UN General Assembly voted for the 30th consecutive time to condemn the American economic, commercial and financial embargo of Cuba with 185 out of the 193-member General Assembly supporting the condemnation.
Repeatedly and deliberately undermining global climate governance. The United States is the world’s largest emitter with the most greenhouse gas emissions in cumulative terms, with its per capita carbon emissions staying high. It refuses to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, once arbitrarily withdrew from the Paris Agreement, and delayed fulfilling its commitments under the Green Climate Fund. Even after returning to the Paris Agreement, the United States has not yet turned its commitments into actions. Instead, it has used the issue of climate change as a partisan tool for political manipulation. According to estimates released by the U.S. economic research company Rhodium Group on Jan. 10, 2023, the U.S. greenhouse gas emissions increased by 1.3 percent year-on-year in 2022. The country lacks sincerity and effectiveness in fulfilling the obligations under the Paris Agreement. The Costs of War Project released by Brown University finds that the U.S. Defense Department is one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters. Post-9/11 U.S. military actions around the globe have “contributed significantly” to climate change.
Exclusive immigration policies create tragedies. The United States arrests migrants on a large scale in its southern border area, creating a serious of humanitarian crises. Nearly 2.4 million migrants were arrested at the U.S. border in 2022, an increase of 37 percent over 2021 and the highest number ever recorded. Migrants’ right to life is seriously threatened. Fox News reported on Oct. 22, 2022 that 856 migrants died at the U.S. southern border in 2022, the highest number on record. Mexico News Daily reported on Nov. 16, 2022 that Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared an “invasion” of migrants at U.S.-Mexico border, saying that he would take measures such as dispatching the National Guard to expel illegal immigrants and deploying gunboats to secure border security. CNN reported on Dec. 16, 2022 that U.S. immigration policies put migrants and asylum seekers at risk, with thousands abducted, sexually assaulted, or violently attacked. The immigration policy has been severely torn apart due to political polarization. Migrants have been reduced to a tool of partisan divide, facing extreme xenophobia and cruel treatment. The farce of “dumping” migrants has been staged on a large scale. CNN reported on Dec. 26, 2022 that more than 100 migrants, including children, were transported to Washington D.C. and abandoned on the roadside on Christmas Eve in 2022. The temperature was below freezing, and some migrants wore only T-shirts in the frigid weather. Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, criticized the U.S. government’s border immigration policy as a threat to the basic rights of asylum seekers and undermines the foundation of international human rights and refugee law.
Refusing to close Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Guantanamo Bay detention camp, established in 2002, once held up to about 780 people, most of whom were detained without trial and were subjected to cruel and inhuman treatment. The camp is “an ugly chapter of unrelenting human rights violations” by the United States. Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, and other independent experts issued a joint statement in January 2022, pointing out that the notorious Guantanamo detention facility is “a stain on the U.S. Government’s commitment to the rule of law.” They demanded that the U.S. government close it and provide remedy and reparation for those egregiously tortured and arbitrarily detained, and hold those that authorized and engaged in torture accountable as required by international law.
