Hypocritical Human Rights Reports

The U.S. State Department released its country reports on global human rights last week. While it’s a great resource for seeing how governments are treating people around the globe, there seems to be one embarrassing omission: a report on the United States. (Even Canada, our gentle neighbor to the north, did not evade scrutiny.)

China, which has a detailed and disturbing report, did not take the criticism lightly. It issued its own report in which it stated: “The United States ignores its own severe human rights problems, ardently promoting its so-called ‘human rights diplomacy’, treating human rights as a political tool to vilify other countries and to advance its own strategic interests.”

It’s particularly bad timing for the U.S. considering that Juan Mendez, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture, also chimed in with his own reprimand just last Monday. Mendez wanted to meet with Bradley Manning, who many claim is being held in a cruel and inhumane way for allegedly providing classified documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to Wikileaks. The Pentagon, however, refused his request to speak with Manning alone, without the presence of a guard.

So it seems that China may have a point. The State Department’s reports, while very helpful, are painfully hypocritical. I’m still baffled that there was a report on Canada specifically citing the Mounties’ use of tasers. If the goal with the reports is to apply diplomatic pressure, then perhaps the omission of a report on the United States makes sense. However, if the goal is to actually improve and protect human rights around the globe, then the U.S. needs to report its own human rights practices. Is it unrealistic to expect a nation to hold itself up its own standards? Perhaps, but I believe that American can still mean exceptional.