And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: Activist Mailing List - http://get.to/activist Source : Human Rights Watch Annual Report 1999 URL: http://www.hrw.org/worldreport99/usa/index.html UNITED STATES Human Rights Developments The United States has long regarded itself as a beacon of human rights, as evidenced by an enlightened constitution, judicial independence, and a civil society grounded in strong traditions of free speech and press freedom. But the reality is more complex; for decades, civil rights and civil liberties groups have exposed constitutional violations and challenged abusive policies and practices. In recent years, as well, international human rights monitors have documented serious gaps in U.S. protections of the human rights of vulnerable groups. Both federal and state governments have nonetheless resisted applying to the U.S. the standards that, rightly, the U.S. applies elsewhere. In the Clinton administration Americans have a leadership willing to recognize some core inequities—racial, gender and other types of discrimination, for example—but nonetheless unwilling to incorporate key international human rights principles fully into U.S. domestic policies and practices, as described below. At the same time, senior figures of the congressionally dominant Republican Party and many state-level governments—which are bound by U.S. obligations under human rights treaties—have denounced international standards as intrusive while advocating policies that effectively infringe upon the human rights of citizens and new arrivals. In 1998, as in previous years, the U.S. failed to address human rights criticism absent sustained national and international attention—and sometimes even then. Conservative politicians and their allies, often using ugly rhetoric, led successful efforts to craft or maintain policies that excluded unpopular or controversial groups—convicted criminals, immigrants, and members of certain minorities, among others—from full protection of their human rights, despite the protests of U.S.-based rights groups and liberal members of Congress. “Get tough” anti-crime policies, which enjoyed significant public support, became the vehicle for many of the most serious abuses. As a result, abusive police officers or prison guards too often enjoyed impunity; the internationally recognized rights of asylum seekers continued to be drastically curtailed; discrimination persisted in policies regarding gay men and lesbians; minority racial groups continued to be over represented among those sentenced to death; state-sponsored executions continued, even of juvenile offenders and the mentally incompetent; and many of the nation’s prisons and jails —increasingly populated by nonviolent offenders, due to the “war on drugs”—continued to be overcrowded, violent places where sexual abuse by male inmates and, in women’s prisons, by male guards, was insufficiently controlled or prosecuted. Three visits by special U.N. rapporteurs on various aspects of human rights took place during 1997 and 1998. The U.S. government’s poor treatment of the first visiting rapporteur—an expert on the death penalty and arbitrary killings by police, who issued a critical report in 1998—led to an outcry by human rights groups and others, prompting greater cooperation with the two rapporteurs who came subsequently to study religious intolerance and women’s rights, respectively. Among the problems highlighted by the rapporteurs’ visits was a pervasive official ignorance of the U.S.’s international human rights obligations. This was evident at the federal level, where even responsible and committed civil rights staff at the Justice Department were unaware of international human rights norms. But it was especially severe at the state and local levels, where the rapporteurs encountered varying degrees of hostility. The federal government has an obligation to remedy this enormous gap in knowledge, which translates into practical failures of enforcement. A concerted effort must be made to educate officials at all levels on the standards that enhance existing human rights protections in the U.S. under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and international conventions banning racial discrimination and torture or ill-treatment. The federal government should also set a better example to state and local governments, by changing federal policies of U.S. exceptionalism with regard to international human rights treaties—both those the U.S. has ratified and those that, alone among Western developed nations, it has failed to ratify. In 1998, the United States continued to exempt itself from its international human rights obligations, particularly where international human rights law grants protections or redress not available under U.S. law. In ratifying international human rights treaties it has typically carved away added protections for those in the United States by adding reservations, declarations, and understandings. Even years after ratifying key human rights treaties, the U.S. still fails to acknowledge human rights law as U.S. law. Moreover, the U.S. is behind the rest of the developed world in failing to ratify the key international instrument on women’s rights and virtually alone in the world in failing to ratify the international children’s rights convention. The United States’s disregard for international human rights standards has not been limited to domestic matters. During the year, it has also opposed human rights initiatives on issues of broad international interest, including landmines, child soldiers, and the creation of the International Criminal Court. In the case of landmines, the United States refused to join the 133 nations, including nearly every major U.S. ally, that had already signed the treaty by October 1998. It blocked international efforts to end the use of child soldiers, arguing against a proposed optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child that would raise the minimum age for military recruitment and participation in armed conflict to eighteen. And the United States was one of only seven states voting against the statute creating the ICC at the Rome Diplomatic Conference in July; 120 states voted for the treaty. Police Abuse Mistreatment by law enforcement officers in the United States continued in 1998, remaining one of the most serious and divisive human rights violations in the country. The violations persisted nationwide, in rural, suburban, and urban areas of the country, committed by various law enforcement personnel including local and state police, sheriff’s departments, and federal agents. Police have engaged in unjustified shootings, severe beatings, fatal chokings, and unnecessarily rough treatment. While the proportion of repeatedly abusive officers on any force is generally small, responsible authorities—including law enforcement supervisors, as wellas local and federal government leadership—often failed to act decisively to restrain or penalize such acts. Police abuse continued, in part, because accountability systems to restrain abusive behavior were inadequate. Weak civilian review, flawed internal investigations, and rare criminal prosecutions by federal or local prosecutors virtually guaranteed that officers who engaged in brutality would avoid punishment of any kind. Meanwhile, civil lawsuits filed against cities and their police departments for alleged civil rights violations by officers continued to cost taxpayers millions of dollars. Measuring the extent of the problem of police abuse was made more difficult by the Justice Department’s failure to compile annual statistics on the use of excessive force by police officers, as Congress instructed it to do in 1994. On the positive side, the Justice Department did begin to utilize its civil powers to identify police departments exhibiting a “pattern or practice” of abuse and requiring reforms. Race and ethnicity continued to play a central role in police brutality in the United States. In places where data were available, members of minority groups had alleged human rights violations by police more frequently than non-minority residents and far out of proportion to their representation in those places. Police have subjected minorities to apparently discriminatory treatment and in some cases have physically abused people of color while using racial epithets. Official responses to a July 1998 Human Rights Watch report on police abuse and accountability in fourteen cities differed greatly from city to city. Some cities’ officials acknowledged the problems identified in the report, while other officials resorted to name-calling and denial. Human Rights Watch continued to work with the departments that expressed an interest in our findings and recommendations regarding common failings in accountability systems and to urge conditionality on federal aid to police departments that allowed impunity for officers responsible for serious abuses. Conditions in Custody In many jails, prisons, immigration detention centers and juvenile detention facilities, confined individuals suffered from physical mistreatment, excessive disciplinary sanctions, barely tolerable physical conditions, and inadequate medical and mental health care. Unfortunately, there was little support from politicians or the public for reform. Fifty-three percent of all state inmates were incarcerated for nonviolent crimes, while criminal justice policies increased the length of prison sentences and diminished the availability of parole. The U.S. incarcerated a greater proportion of its population than any country except Russia: more than 1.7 million people were either in prison or in jail in 1998, reflecting an incarceration rate of more than 645 per 100,000 residents, double the rate of a decade before. Approximately one in every 117 adult males was in prison. Surging prison populations and public reluctance to fund new construction produced dangerously overcrowded prisons. Violence continued to be pervasive: in 1997 (the most recent year for which data were available), sixty-nine inmates were killed by other inmates, and thousands were injured seriously enough to require medical attention. Extortion and intimidation were commonplace. Most inmates had scant opportunities for work, training, education, treatment or counseling. Mentally ill inmates—estimated to constitute between 6 and 14 percent of the incarcerated population—rarely received adequate monitoring or treatment. Many local jails were dirty, unsafe, vermin-infested, and lacked areas in which inmates could exercise or get fresh air. Some jail authorities placed inmates in restraining devices for long periods far in excess of legitimate safety considerations. Severe overcrowding coupled with inadequate staffing in many jails created dangerous conditions reflected in the numbers of inmates injured in fights, who experienced seizures and other medical emergencies without proper attention, and who managed to escape. Authorities relied increasingly on administrative segregation in super-maximum security prisons to maintain control. Prisoners deemed particularly disruptive or dangerous were isolated in small, often windowless cells for twenty-three hours a day; more than 24,000 prisoners were kept in this modern form of solitary confinement at any given time. 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