Amnesty Criticizes U.S. Justice System
San Francisco Chronicle, Monday October 5, 1998
from an article by Barbara Crossette in the New York Times
Amnesty International, in its first campaign directed at any Western
nation, intends to publish a harsh report on the United States tomorrow,
saying US. police forces and criminal and legal systems have "a persistent
and widespread pattern of human rights violations."
Amnesty International, the 37 year-old human rights organization based
in London, plans to make its report the focus of a year-long effort in more
than 100 countries and in international bodies like the United Nations to
protest what it calls a US. failure "to deliver the fundamental promise
of rights for all."
The report is part of a growing effort among human rights organizations
to seek "balance" in reporting by looking at industrialized as
well as developing nations. The Clinton administration has encouraged that
trend more than its predecessors, welcoming monitors from the U.N. Human
Rights Commission in the face of sharp criticism from some members of Congress.
But U.S. officials and U.S human rights groups that are also often critical
have had mixed reactions to some international reports, describing some
as selective or lacking in nuance and context and often deliberately excluding
background information on civil rights protections in the United States.
The new Amnesty report is bound to be among the most controversial of
the recent surveys. Officials in New York, which figures prominently, and
in Washington declined to comment because they had not seen the report.
The 150 page report pulls together widely reported cases of abuses around
the United States and incorporates the work of U.S. advocacy groups and
Amnesty investigations. Without responses from U.S. officials, it concludes
with this statement:
"Across the country thousands of people are subjected to sustained
and deliberate brutality at the hands of police officers. Cruel, degrading
and sometimes life-threatening methods of constraint continue to be a feature
of the US. criminal justice system."
The report also condemns what is sees as a general failure to punish
offending officials. It criticizes the treatment of people who seek asylum
by US. immigration authorities and calls, as Amnesty has done in the past,
for the abolition of the death penalty, which the report says is "often
enacted in vengeance, applied in an arbitrary manner, subject to bias because
of the defendant's race or economic status, or driven by the political ambitions
of those who oppose it."
Pierre Sane, a development expert from Senegal who has been secretary-general
of Amnesty International for six years, said in an interview that the United
States was chosen as the first Western target because human rights conditions
were deteriorating.
"We felt it was ironic that the most powerful country in the world
uses international human rights laws to criticize others," Sane said,
"but does not apply the same standards at home."
The report criticizes the United States for failing to sign international
rights conventions, among them the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
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