UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 21 (Xinhua) — The United States, Britain, France and a few other countries, which always pretend to be righteous and try to lecture others and point fingers at China and other developing countries on human rights issues, are actually the ones who have a deplorable record on human rights, having committed numerous crimes, China’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations (UN) said on Thursday.
1. The United States
Rights of the indigenous people have been violated in the United States. The United States carried out inhuman ethnic cleansing against Native Americans. By the beginning of the 20th century, the Native American population had plummeted from 5 million in 1492 to 0.25 million.
While slaughtering the indigenous people, American leaders have also assimilated them culturally in order to eliminate dissidents. To this day, Native Americans still live like second-class citizens, and their rights have been trampled upon.
Moreover, bullying against Asian Americans has escalated. Since the pandemic began, incidents of Asian Americans being humiliated and even assaulted in public have been on the rise.
A survey of young Asian Americans reported by the National Broadcasting Company showed that in the past year, a quarter of young Asian Americans became targets of racial bullying, and nearly half of the respondents expressed pessimism about their situation, and a quarter of the respondents expressed fear about their situation and that of their families.
Unchecked police violence has led to frequent deaths of African Americans. A study in The Lancet by experts of Washington University and other institutions found that 30,800 people have died from police violence in the United States between 1980 and 2018, 17,100 of whom were unreported in official statistics reports.
It is also found that African Americans were 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans. In February 2021, independent UN human rights experts called on the United States to adopt wide-ranging reforms to put an end to police brutality and vigorously address systemic racism and racial discrimination.
In June, Chairperson of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and 27 experts of the Special Procedures of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent of the Human Rights Council published a joint statement which condemned the racial lynching and prosecution in the United States, and called on the U.S. government to conduct independent investigations, look into all cases where police are accountable for the use of excessive force, and resolve systemic racism and racial prejudice in the U.S. criminal justice system.
The United States left a mess in Afghanistan. The United States launched the Afghan War in the name of counter-terrorism. After 20 years, the number of terrorist organizations in Afghanistan has grown from a single digit to over 20, more than 100,000 Afghan civilians have been killed or wounded in the gunfire of U.S. troops and its ally forces, and more than 10 million people have been displaced. The Afghan War has destroyed the foundation of the Afghan economy. The Afghan people have been impoverished and entrenched in a humanitarian crisis.
Incompetent pandemic containment has led to tragic outcomes. The United States claimed to be most abundant in medical resources and healthcare capacity, yet its response to the COVID-19 pandemic was chaotic, causing it to lead the world in the numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases and related deaths. Many lives could have been saved had the U.S. authorities taken science-based measures to contain the pandemic. As epidemiologist and former head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention William Foege put it, the pandemic has caused “a slaughter” in the United States.
2. The United Kingdom
Racial issues have long beset Britain, as is known around the world. A report of the CERD shows a sharp increase in recent years in systemic discrimination, violent provocations and hate crimes against minority groups in Britain.
Since the onset of COVID-19, minority ethnic groups in Britain have been experiencing a worsening situation in terms of medical care and employment. According to a report published by The Lancet, “ethnic minorities in the UK are at significantly greater risk of severe disease and death from COVID-19 than their white counterparts.” A British think tank report showed that Britain’s jobless rate for young people of African or Asian descent rose to 35 percent and 24 percent respectively, nearly three times and twice the rate of their white counterparts.
Apart from racial issues, British society is fraught with other human rights issues. It has a poor record of ignoring the life and health of its own people, and it has committed crimes such as killing innocent people in other countries. One third of British families with children aged under five live below the poverty line, and many children suffer from hunger. The rights of refugees and immigrants have been severely violated.
Britain has committed countless horrifying crimes all over the world during hundreds of years of colonial rule. The world’s first concentration camp in South Africa carries with it the disgraceful brand of the British Empire. British forces have killed innocent people in Afghanistan. In 2011, 33 civilians were killed during 11 night raids in three months, but the culprits were sheltered by the government and remain unpunished by law.
3. France
France has massacred tens of thousands of people during the colonial period, which constitutes a crime against humanity. Also, France has killed and injured civilians in the “Operation Barkhane.” According to an investigation report released by the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali, 19 civilians were killed by a French military airstrike on the central Malian village of Bounty on Jan. 3, 2021.
Also, France has evicted minority groups. According to the European Roma Rights Center’s report, in France, between 10,000 and 15,000 Romani people are evicted annually.
Furthermore, Agence France-Presse reported that polls show that about half of Muslims living in France believe that they have encountered discrimination at least once for religious reasons.
Finally, France has poor prison conditions. The Council of Europe Committee for the Prevention of Torture, in a report on its periodic visit to France in December 2019, expressed serious concern about the material conditions of detention in police establishments, prison overcrowding, as well as the conditions in which detained persons were transferred to and treated in hospitals. – XINHUA
