Iraq and Afghanistan

China has recently come out with a human rights report on the United States. It is available in English here. China intends this to be counter-propaganda against the State Department's annual human rights report that always has many negative things to say about China. (Even though their report is ostensibly developed as propaganda against the American Human Rights report, I doubt if average Chinese have access to the American original.)

However, it is useful for Americans, and indeed all peoples, to examine and think about the ways in which the United States can be said to fail to live up to the high human rights standards that we expect the rest of the world to attain. It is significant that the primary sources for the Chinese report are reports on leading American newspapers. Their treatment is often unbalanced, but it is generally based on relatively noncontroversial data.

The Chinese report emphasizes problems in personal security in America, pointing out the high level of violent crime and the large number of people in American jails. There is also a good deal on how inmates are treated. They point out the high levels of poverty and joblessness. They point to the difference in the ways in which different races live in the United States, pointing out how the inferred racial discrimination is against the very words of the Declaration of Independence. They point to high rates of rape, emphasizing particularly sexual crimes against children. (As is often the case with these discussions, there is no reference to things being better in China or elsewhere — lack of useful statistics is probably one reason.) The Chinese report particular faults the United States for its treatment of foreign nationals, beginning with the mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The interested reader should go the full document referenced above. One cannot agree with the Chinese advice that given these shortfalls in our behavior we should give up our report, but one can agree that "the United States should reflect on its erroneous behavior on human rights and take its own human rights problems seriously". Would that there could be a cross-cutting world of such reports. There could not be a better kind of competition.