UK: Murderous colonial cradle
While the UK prides itself as the world “leader” in human rights protection, the opposite is true, especially since the outbreak of COVID- 19. Poverty in the country has increased, along with the blatant disregard for people’s right to life and access to healthcare with ethnic minorities among the worst affected, analysts pointed out.
From 2018 to 2019, 14.4 million people in the UK were living below the poverty line, 4.5 million among them being children, an increase of 100,000 from the previous year; 7 percent of the population lives in extreme poverty and 11 percent of the population lives in persistent poverty, the Guardian reported.
The country’s poor handling of the epidemic is deplorable, with the country once having proposed “herd immunity” as a strategy to contain the virus, leaving vulnerable groups exposed to infection.
According to a report by the Public Health Agency of England ( PHE), the COVID- 19 death rate among British- Bengalis is twice that of the whites, and the death rate among those of Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, and Caribbean descent is 10 percent to 50 percent higher than that of the whites.
A report done by UK- based, black peopleled researching organization Clear View Research showed that the majority of black people in the UK don’t think their rights are equally protected as those of the white people.
According to Sky News, hate crimes against Chinese people in the UK soared during the epidemic outbreak. At least 267 offenses were reported in the first three months of 2020 including harassment, robberies, assaults, and criminal damage.
Islamophobia is also on the rise in the UK. In a detailed study released in 2019 by the Center for Media Monitoring of the Muslim Council of Britain, among over 10,000 articles and clips referring to Muslims and Islam in the period of the fourth quarter of 2018, 59 percent of all articles associated Muslims with negative behavior. About 37 percent of articles in right- leaning and religious publications were categorized with the most negative rating of “very biased,” and over one- third of all articles misrepresented or made generalizations about Muslims.
At the same time, according to Modern slavery in the UK: March 2020, a report released on March 2020 by Office for National Statistics ( ONS) in the UK, “there were 5,144 modern slavery offences recorded by the police in England and Wales in the year ending March 2019, an increase of 51 percent from the previous year.” The number of potential victims increased by 36 percent to 10,627 in the year ending December 2018 compared with the previous year.
The ONS analyzed that the actual number of victims of modern slavery in Britain may be as high as 136,000. The top three nationalities of victims were British, Albanian and Vietnamese.
A large amount of evidence shows that in 2003, the British army captured and tortured thousands of Iraqi civilians in Iraq’s southern city of Basrah, and many innocent civilians died. During its stay in Afghanistan, the UK Special Air Service ( SAS) repeatedly attacked villages and massacred villagers under the cover of darkness in the name of anti- terrorism and made it a “antiterrorism success.”
There were more than 3,400 charges of war crimes, 90 percent of which were not investigated. In three months in 2011 alone, 33 civilians were suspected of being killed in 11 separate night attacks, the Times reported.
Michelle Bachelet Jeria, the High Commissioner of the United Nations Human Rights, expressed concerns on April 12, 2021, over the UK putting forward a new Overseas Operations Bill.
According to the new UK bill, if torture or other serious human rights violations committed by British soldiers overseas exceed a limit of five years, they will not be prosecuted in principle. If a prosecution must be put forward, the prosecutor must get the consent of the British Attorney General or the Attorney General of Northern Ireland.