New UN Report Denounces America's Human Rights Record

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New UN Report Denounces America's Human Rights Record - by Stephen Lendman

On May 26, the UN Human Rights Council issued a report titled "Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Including the Right to Development - Report of the Special Rapporteur (Philip Alston) on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions."

Alston was damning in his criticism regarding "three areas in which significant improvement is necessary if the US Government is to match its actions to its stated commitment to human rights and the rule of law:"

(1) Its imposition of the death penalty under which innocent people are executed. Alston was shocked about "glaring criminal justice system flaws," citing Texas and Alabama as examples, but many other states are as derelict. He criticized politicized judges and recommended that Congress "should enact legislation permitting federal court habeas review of state and federal death penalty cases on their merits."

He condemned the 2006 Military Commissions Act and its provisions that violate international human rights and humanitarian law with regard to due process and fairness.

(2) America needs "greater transparency into law enforcement, military, and intelligence operations that result in unlawful deaths." Domestically, it provides inadequate information about deaths of immigrants and other detainees, but the worst failures are in international military and intelligence operations.

(3) The government fails to "provide greater accountability for potentially unlawful deaths in its international operations." It ignores civilian casualties, both their number and conditions under which they occur, and fails to provide ordinary people, including US citizens, with basic information regarding investigations and prosecutions when laws were violated. It fails to assure safeguards are in place to prevent so-called collateral damage - that is, civilians wrongfully (and at times willfully) targeted and killed.

Overall, "there have been chronic and deplorable accountability failures with respect to policies, practices and conduct that (cause) alleged unlawful killings - including possible war crimes - in the United States' international operations." Effective investigations have been lacking and guilty parties, throughout the chain of command, haven't been punished. Even worse, private contractors and civilian intelligence personnel have been granted "a zone of impunity" because of failures to hold them accountable. Alston recommends a national "commission of inquiry" and a special prosecutor to conduct thorough investigations "independent of the pressure on the political branches of Government."

More on this below.

In June 2008, Alston spent two week in America meeting with federal and state officials, judges and civil society groups, as well as victims and witnesses in five US cities. As a signatory to international human rights laws, including the four Geneva Conventions, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and Convention against Torture, the US is bound by their provisions and required to hold its civilians and military personnel accountable when they violate them.

Domestic Issues

The federal government, 35 states, and US military impose death penalties, often executing innocent people for failing to assure proper due process and fairness. Alston addressed the federal death penalty and its application in Texas and Alabama, the former for its largest number of US executions, the latter for having the nation's highest per capita rate of them.

Yet since 1973, 130 death row inmates nationwide were exonerated, and their numbers keep growing. Since 1977, 13 in Illinois were also declared innocent and freed, a state where governor George Ryan took unprecedented steps:

-- on January 31, 2000, he declared a moratorium on further executions after acknowledging a deeply flawed system under which innocent men and women are executed;

-- then in January 2003, he commuted the sentences of all 156 death row prisoners - an action only matched by the Supreme Court in Furman v. Georgia (June 29, 1972) when it struck down capital punishment at the state and federal levels, calling existing statutes unconstitutional, "arbitrary and capricious," and commuted the sentences of all 629 inmates on death row - until it reinstated it in Gregg v. Georgia on July 2, 1976.

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Book Recommendations for "Execution Human Rights Injustice"

Systemic Injustice: Torture, "Disappearance," and Extrajudicial Execution in Mexico
by America Human Rights Watch

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Number of pages: 136
Publisher: Human Rights Watch