It is not necessary to comply...

Citizen insecurity in many spheres of life is the reality in the United States

If you ask the question ‘What country talks the most about protecting human rights?’ in different parts of the world, the answer will be the same — the United States. It is the US that has actually privatised this sphere and has been confidently declaring itself a kind of global mentor for decades. However, the United States can only set a negative example in this regard.

United States criticises everyone

At the end of April, US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken released another report on global human rights. The 2023 report has become the forty-seventh since 1977, when the United States decided that it had the right to criticise other countries and tell the world what is a proper way to protect a person.
The current report, in addition to a general description of the global human rights situation, contains individual country reports. Belarus has not been ignored either — the authors have scribbled down almost 100 pages. Alas, everything is tediously familiar and comes down to a fugitive opposition that is suffering greatly on all fronts.
Only a few points of this document are capable of arousing a sort of interest. Thus, ‘The threat of government retaliation led the few small independent media outlets still operating within the country to exercise self-censorship and avoid reporting on certain topics, including Russia’s war against Ukraine, or criticising the government’.
They could have gone into more detail on this matter and mentioned the names and titles of those heroically hunkered-down media personas. However, thanks for reminding us about the Augean stables left in the country by the opposition that have not been cleaned so far. The cleaning will be definitely carried out to completion.
The report has also unexpectedly mentioned the ‘kidnapping’ of political opponents in other countries. The surprise quickly vanishes though, as that remark refers to the ‘kidnapped’ Protasevich and  plane legend. In fact, Protasevich has been pardoned by the President of Belarus. The man has been living his life for a long time, yet the United States continues rambling on this irrelevant topic in its reports of ‘cosmic scale and cosmic stupidity’. 
In other respects, the report on Belarus is indecently similar to a bunch of others contrived by Belarusian fugitives in recent years. The content of the reports presented by the United States has caused an outrage in many countries. Moreover, the leitmotif of indignation is the message: who gave you the right to criticise others when your own country has a complete mess with human rights? As it turned out, the human rights-related havoc in the United States has really reached the scale that is even hard to imagine. 

Discrimination is legalised

In May 2024, the State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China published its report on human rights in the United States. The authors of the analytical document have emphasised that civil and political rights have long been just words in the United States. In addition, unlike the United States, the Chinese authors have supported their conclusions with specific figures and accurate data that can actually shock an unprepared person. After all, when it comes to the fact that millions of children and adults are starving in the country with the allegedly strongest economy in the world, it is truly shocking.

In fact, as it turned out, the leadership of the United States does not care much about the rights of children and women in its own country. The United States has still not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), or the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. 

As a result, women are paid less — on average by 22.2 percent — pregnancy is often the reason for dismissal, while women’s health and lives in the United States are not protected in any way. As of December 2023, at least 21 states in the United States have banned or severely restricted abortion, and safe abortion is unavailable in most cases. Some US state laws criminalise abortion.
Sexual abuse is widespread in the country. A survey of California State University faculty has found that at least 1,251 CSU employees were the subject of sexual harassment allegations from 2018 to 2022, whereas only 254 complaints were investigated. Let us emphasise that these are statistics for the state’s main university only!
The number of children living below the poverty line is also growing in the United States. In 2022, more than 5 million US children were found to be in poor conditions. In addition, almost 10 million adults and children were excluded from the federal health insurance programme in 2023. In other words, in the 21st century, millions of children are deprived of access to healthcare in the country that calls itself civilised…
Thousands of foster children go missing in the United States every year. In 2023, across 46 states, responsible state agencies failed to report an estimated 34,800 cases of missing foster kids. In Georgia state, nearly 1,800 children in state care went missing between 2018 and 2022. More than 20 percent of them were likely victims of human trafficking. This is because sexual abuse of children is no longer out of the ordinary in the United States — as many as one in 10 teenage girls in the United States have confessed that they have been raped.

Disregard for vulnerable groups of population 

It is not only women and children who are deprived of their civil and sometimes even human rights in the United States. Black people, migrants, the disabled, the homeless — all of these people also have virtually no rights in the US.
African Americans in the United States are three times as likely to be killed by the police as whites, and 4.5 times as likely to go to prison. Of the more than 1,000 police killings each year, only one percent of police officers involved are charged with murder. 
African American women have a higher maternal mortality rate than any other group of women due to racism in the healthcare system. Out of every 100,000 pregnant women of African descent, 69.9 die during pregnancy or childbirth. That rate is nearly three times higher than that of white women. African American infant mortality is also the highest of any ethnic group, at nearly 11 deaths out of every 1,000 live births, which is about twice the national average.
The number of homeless people in the United States hit a 16-year high last year, exceeding 650,000 people, which is the highest since records began in 2007. Forty percent of homeless people live on the streets without shelter, in abandoned buildings, or in other places not designed for human habitation. Needless to say, the homeless and their children are starving and lack access to healthcare.

Business and mass murders

In order to imagine the conditions in which US citizens exist today, it is worth adding to the list the raging drug addiction in the United
States, the growing suicide rate, police arbitrariness, the huge number of migrants and convicts, the political crisis of the US leadership and a host of other problems, including the off the scale violence level with the use of firearms.
Last year, at least 654 mass murders occurred in the United States. Mass murders are considered to be murders of four or more people. Moreover, 43,000 people died from gunshots, an average of 117 people per day.
At the same time, the US firearm giant Smith & Wesson Brands earned at least $125 million in 2021 alone from the sale of assault rifles, which are often used in mass shooting attacks.

Nevertheless, US politicians keep ignoring the opinions of their own citizens and the calls of the international community for gun control measures — likewise in all other aspects of US life, politicians are exclusively guided by profit. But what about people and their rights?

By Alena Krasovskaya