America's Poor Human Rights Record

Iran’s parliament had issued a report on human rights in the United States that demands a closer look.

News ID: 445672

Date: 27 June 2019 - 18:17

RNA - The report constitutes part of the 15 plans that the Parliament has devised to counter the US hostile measures. The report comprises two main sections, including violations of human rights inside the US and at the international level.

It includes various cases of US violations of human rights such as facts on US gun ownership which threatens the lives of people, US police violence, harsh and unjust judicial rulings, violation of rights of Muslims, racial discrimination, violation of rights of women and refugees, invasion of privacy of people, dire conditions in US prisons, sponsoring terrorism, interference in the internal affairs of other countries, and turning a blind eye to the violations of human rights by the Israeli regime and Saudi Arabia.

It is interesting to note that this is not the only report that highlights human rights violations by the US. According to the US-based Commission on Civil Rights, immigrant detention centers of the United States are also plagued with human rights abuses. These violations include denial of food and medical care, lack of due process, and sexual assault.

“These violations are so widespread that all families should be released, detentions reduced, and alternatives to incarceration fostered,” the Commission warns.

The Commission has based its findings on hearings as well as visits to immigrant detention centers nationwide, particularly those along the US-Mexican border. One of these facilities in Karnes City, Texas, is operated by the notorious private prison company GEO Group. Karnes is the site of long-term organizing and numerous hunger strikes led by desperate mothers locked up with their malnourished children, or separated from their children, to protest their inhumane conditions of confinement.

These desperate families as well as illegal migrants and asylum seekers supposedly come to the United States to escape harsh living conditions or persecution, but once they cross the US border, the government apprehends and detains them in conditions that are worse than what they faced in their home countries.

Nor is that all. The Commission's latest report describes many other brutal conditions, in which migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are treated like criminals and stripped of their basic rights. The Commission summarizes its findings:

1- Detention centers are not complying with international standards intended to promote humane treatment of detainees.

2- By continuing to detain unaccompanied children and families, Department of Homeland Security is not respecting the civil rights and due process rights of detainees.

3- Department of Homeland Security does not protect detainees from sexual assault and abuse and needs to come into full compliance with the Prison Rape Elimination Act.

4- Some detention facilities don’t provide good medical care, deny immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers the chance to try to get lawyers, look the other way when rape or sexual abuse occurs, and don’t allow Muslims adequate leeway to practice their religion, including the right to pray and fast in the month of Ramadan.

If this particular report is not uncontestable, we don’t know what is. This moral disaster and deliberate legal failure has nothing to do with the State Department’s latest Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.

According to Fars News Agency, the US government officials, including Mike Pompeo, can portray the Commission’s report as “rehashed innuendo and discredited accusations,” or even call immigrants ‘illegal aliens’ and ‘invading hordes’. Still, their denials do not change the fact that the Commission’s findings echo what the UN Human Rights Council has also argued in its annual reports: “US policies of detention are especially unjust, given the role of the US in driving the economic and political conditions displacing people from Latin America and elsewhere…”

It is said where there is smoke, there is fire. The self-styled “human rights defenders” of the US State Department only fool themselves when they lecture other nations, including Iran, on human rights. They know full well that their own country has a “flawed and lackluster” human rights record which is uncontestable. What’s more, these systematic violations are still ongoing and there has been little change on the ground by President Trump and his White Supremacist administration officials.

It is time these systematic breaches gained greater traction at the United Nations Human Rights Council. They breaches will not go away unless the world body introduces a resolution that obliges the US to ban government-run and private immigrant prisons, end family detentions in torture-like conditions, stop separating children from mothers, release families/refugees/asylum seekers and offer them humanitarian protections, and eliminate an immigrant detention system that is so rife with injustices, discriminations, and double standards.

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