The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2021

Editor’s note: The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China on Feb 28 released a white paper titled “The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2021”. First part below:

Contents

FOREWORD

I. A HEAVY PRICE FOR U.S. EPIDEMIC PREVENTION AND CONTROL

II. ENTRENCHED VIOLENT THINKING THREATENS LIVES

III. PLAYING WITH FAKE DEMOCRACY TRAMPLES ON POLITICAL RIGHTS

IV. INDULGING IN RACIAL DISCRIMINATION EXACERBATES SOCIAL INJUSTICE

V. CREATING A MIGRANT CRISIS AGAINST HUMANITY

VI. ABUSE OF FORCE AND SANCTIONS VIOLATES HUMAN RIGHTS IN OTHER COUNTRIES

FOREWORD

The human rights situation in the United States, which has notorious records, worsened in 2021. Political manipulation led to a sharp surge in COVID-19 deaths; Shooting deaths hit a new record; Fake democracy trampled on people’s political rights; Violent law enforcement made life harder for migrants and refugees; Discrimination against ethnic minority groups, especially Asians, intensified. In the meantime, unilateral U.S. actions created new humanitarian crises across the globe.

— The United States has the world’s highest number of COVID-19 cases and deaths, with 34.51 million confirmed cases and 480,000 fatalities, which far surpassed the numbers in 2020. Average life expectancy fell by 1.13 years, the biggest drop since the Second World War.

— Public security situation in the United States deteriorated and violent crimes remained prevalent. There were 693 mass shootings in 2021, up 10.1 percent from 2020. More than 44,000 people were killed in gun violence.

— More than 420 bills with provisions that restrict voting access have been introduced in 49 U.S. states. Only 7 percent of young Americans view the country as a “healthy democracy,” while public trust in the government has fallen to almost historical low since 1958.

— Around 81 percent of Asian American adults said violence against Asian communities is rising. Hate crimes against Asians in the New York City jumped 361 percent from 2020. Fifty-nine percent of Americans said ethnic minority groups do not have equal job opportunities.

— In fiscal year 2021, the United States detained more than 1.7 million migrants at its southern border, including 45,000 children. Violent law enforcement claimed 557 lives, the highest number since 1998, which more than doubled that of the previous fiscal year.

— A U.S. drone strike during its withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan killed 10 members of an Afghan family, including seven children, among which the youngest was only two years old. The United States still held 39 detainees at the Guantanamo prison.

Fernand de Varennes, a special rapporteur on minority issues of the United Nations, said the U.S. legal system of human rights protection is incomplete and outdated, which has led to growing inequality.

As for the U.S. malpractice in creating human rights crises in other countries in the name of human rights, Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University, said “Americans must first fix what has gone wrong at home and rethink how they deal with the rest of the world.”

In 2021, the U.S. public persona of “human rights defender” was totally debunked as the so-called “Summit for Democracy” under the guise of safeguarding human rights became a farce. At the 48th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, many countries blasted the United States for being the “biggest destroyer” of human rights in the world and urged the country to address its own severe human rights violations.

I. A HEAVY PRICE FOR U.S. EPIDEMIC PREVENTION AND CONTROL

Despite having world’s most advanced medical equipment and technology, the United States has the biggest number of COVID-19 infections and deaths globally. The U.S. government never rethinks its response measures and still lacks effective anti-epidemic plans. Instead, it stoked the origins-tracing of COVID-19, and has been keen on passing the buck, shifting the blame and political manipulation.

Disregard for people’s rights to life and health. Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States, the epidemic prevention and control has been highly politicized, which has become a tool and a bargaining chip for Republicans and Democrats to attack, reject and confront each other. U.S. politicians focused only on their political gains in disregard of people’s lives and health. The federal and local governments went their own way and constrained each other, which has not only made it very difficult to integrate and coordinate the management of medical resources, but also made people disoriented about epidemic prevention and control policies. And thus various antiintellectual words and deeds that reject science and common sense have become prevalent. Misled by political manipulation, some Americans

refused to wear masks, and even launched an anti-vaccine movement, which accelerated the spread of COVID-19. By the end of 2021, nearly 30 percent of Americans still had not been vaccinated, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The Associated Press (AP) reported on Dec 19, 2021 that U.S. hospitals were overwhelmed as COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations caused by infections among the unvaccinated continued to surge. States, local governments and the public “have now been left out on their own,” American news website Vox said on Jan 2, 2021. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, by late February 2022, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States had exceeded 78 million and the death toll surpassed 940,000. Its number of COVID-19 deaths recorded in 2021 has far surpassed the total for 2020. According to the analysis by researchers at the University of Southern California and Princeton University, the deaths caused by COVID-19 have reduced overall life expectancy by 1.13 years, the biggest drop since the Second World War. Life expectancy was estimated to fall by 2.10 years among African Americans and 3.05 years among Latinos, while the decline was 0.68 years among whites. The U.S. government’s unscientific, unequal and irresponsible epidemic prevention and control conducts have seriously undermined its people’s rights to life and health. The New York Times reported on Nov 18, 2021, that the pandemic has proved to be a nearly two-year stress test that the United States “flunked,” and that the American people’s trust in their government has been “bankrupt.”

People’s mental health deteriorated due to the uncontrolled outbreak. A study published in The Lancet Regional Health — Americas in October 2021 found 32.8 percent of U.S. adults experienced “elevated depressive symptoms” in 2021, compared to 27.8 percent in the early 2020 months of the pandemic and 8.5 percent before the pandemic. According to a public opinion poll, more than a third of Americans aged between 13 and 56 said the pandemic is a significant source of stress in their lives. The poll finds teens and young adults have faced some of the heaviest struggles as they come of age during a time of extreme turmoil, the AP reported on Dec 6, 2021. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy was cited by The Los Angeles Times as saying on Dec 9, 2021, that the number of suspected suicide attempts in 2021 was 51 percent higher among adolescent girls compared to the same period in 2019.

The number of the homeless is staggering. The Washington Post reported on Dec 7, 2021, that “homelessness is one of the United States’ greatest current challenges, no matter the region.” The AP reported on Sept 9, 2021, that the number of people without permanent shelter in Rhode Island had increased by more than 85 percent since January 2021. According to a report by the group Advocates for Children, more than 100,000 New York City schoolchildren were homeless at some point during the 2020-2021 school year. The total number of homeless students during the school year represented nearly one-tenth of the city’s public school system. Some students had to live in cars, parks or abandoned buildings. The New York Times reported on Dec 19, 2021, that in San Francisco one of every 100 residents was homeless.

The elderly’s rights to life are flagrantly violated. U.S. politicians have followed the natural law of “selecting the superior and eliminating the inferior,” declaring that “the elderly could sacrifice for the country” and that “the national economy is more important than the lives of the elderly.” The U.S. CDC said that the vast majority of U.S. COVID-19 deaths have been among people aged 65 or older. According to Stat News, an American health-oriented news website, more than half a million elderly people in the United States have died from COVID-19, accounting for four-fifths of all fatalities. According to a report by Claudia Mahler, the United Nations independent expert on older people, on July 21, 2020, discrimination in the delivery of health care services, insufficient prioritization of nursing homes in responses to the virus, and lockdowns left older people more vulnerable to neglect or abuse. And there was “a significant undercount of nursing home deaths” in the United States during the pandemic. Serious damage to the global anti-pandemic cooperation.

Washington vigorously pursues “America First,” not only withholding anti-epidemic materials from other countries, but also prohibiting the export of domestic medical materials and buying out the production capacity of drugs that may be used to treat COVID-19 patients. The United States has repeatedly coerced the WHO, interfering and dragging down global anti-pandemic cooperation.

The United States has engaged in “vaccine nationalism,” pushing some underdeveloped countries and regions into a desperate situation of having no vaccines to administer.

Since March 2021, the United States has thrown away at least 15 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine, significantly more than many poor countries have prepared for their whole populations, according to NBC News on Sept 1, 2021.

“It’s really tragic that we have a situation where vaccines are being wasted while lots of African countries have not had even 5 percent of their populations vaccinated,” said Sharifah Sekalala, an associate professor of global health law at England’s University of Warwick.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa also slammed rich countries over their hoarding of vaccines, adding that “they are just giving us the crumbs from their table. The greed they demonstrated was disappointing.”

The Biden administration is still pursuing U.S. interests in ways that are detrimental to the interests of the rest of the world, commented an article on the website of the U.S. Foreign Policy magazine.

II. ENTRENCHED VIOLENT THINKING THREATENS LIVES

The United States has consistently had one of the highest rates of violent crimes in the world. Gun control measures have been stagnant and gun violence has been rife. The police are discriminatory in law enforcement, killing innocent people and causing public anger. Law enforcement officers commit crimes with impunity, and judicial injustice has been widely criticized. Wrongful and unjust cases continue to exist without being corrected and compensated effectively. Prison inmates are abused, and domestic violence as well as youth violence has increased significantly. The American people live in fear of lack of security.

Deterioration of social order has accelerated the proliferation

of guns. The United States is the country with the largest number of privately owned guns in the world. The U.S. public have lost confidence in the government’s social security governance and felt extremely insecure, which drives many to purchase guns to protect themselves.

The Small Arms Survey (SAS) researchers estimate that Americans own 393 million of the 857 million civilian guns available, which is around 46 percent of the world’s civilian gun cache.

There are 120 guns for every 100 Americans, according to the SAS. No other nation has more civilian guns than people.

Everytown for Gun Safety also reported on Dec 21, 2021, that over 15 million guns were sold through October.

“Ghost guns,” which are assembled from parts purchased by individuals online, are even more proliferating.

According to a report by The New York Times website on Nov 20, 2021, over the past 18 months, ghost guns had accounted for 25 to 50 percent of firearms recovered at crime scenes.

By the beginning of October last year, the San Diego Police Department had recovered almost 400 ghost guns, about doubling the total for all of 2020 with nearly three months to go in the year.

It also reported that since January 2016, about 25,000 privately made firearms had been confiscated by local and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide. Gun violence seriously endangers people’s lives. The United States has the worst gun violence in the world. According to statistics released on Jan 5, 2022, by the Gun Violence Archive website, the number of fatalities from shootings in

A study of 20 million traffic stops in North Carolina over more than a decade shows that African American drivers are twice as likely as white drivers to be pulled over by police.

the United States rose from 39,558 in 2019 to 43,643 in 2020, and further to 44,816 in 2021. In 2021, there were 693 mass shootings in the United States, up 10.1 percent from 2020.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on Oct 5, 2021, that children and teens in the United States are 15 times more likely to die from gunfire than their peers in 31 other high-income countries combined, quoting data from the Children’s Defense Fund.

At least 30 shootings occurred on U.S. campuses during the school season from Aug 1 to Sept 15, 2021, killing at least five people and injuring 23, the highest number on record.

A total of 1,229 teens aged 12 to 17 were killed and 3,373 injured in shootings in the United States in 2021. On Nov 30, 2021, four students were killed in a mass shooting at a Michigan high school by a 15-yearold suspect who used the same gun that his father bought on Black Friday.

CNN reported on Nov 26, 2021, that Jason R. Silva, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at William Paterson University, said that the United States is the only developed country where mass shootings have happened every single year for the past 20 years.

Shooting incidents have caused a large number of casualties and posed a major threat to public safety. According to an April 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 48 percent of Americans see gun violence as a very big problem in the country today. Police brutality tramples

human life. According to data compiled by Mapping Police Violence, at least 1,124 people died in 2021 due to U.S. police violence. The majority of killings occurred during non-violent offenses or when there was no crime at all.

The USA TODAY website reported on June 21, 2021, that police in the United States fatally shoot about 1,000 people a year. Police have fatally shot more than 6,300 people since 2015, but only 91 officers have been arrested, or just 1 percent of those involved.

The USA TODAY website reported on July 8, 2021, that a poll showed that just 22 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. police treat all Americans equally.

Racial and ethnic groups are often subjected to unfair justice. The USA TODAY website reported on July 15, 2021, that a 20-year-old AfricanAmerican man in Minnesota, Daunte Wright, was shot and killed by police after being pulled over outside Minneapolis for an expired license plate. Wright’s death was one of a string of incidents in which African-Americans were pulled over for traffic violations and killed innocently.

A study of 20 million traffic stops in North Carolina over more than a decade shows that African American drivers are twice as likely as white drivers to be pulled over by police.

The USA TODAY website reported on May 24, 2021, that within a year of the death of George Floyd, who died after an officer knelt on his neck for nine minutes, enforcement killed hundreds of people of ethnic minorities in the United States.

According to the report, since the year 2000, there have been over 470 murders at the hands of law enforcement in Minnesota. Only one police

officer was convicted in the history of Minnesota and that was a minority man that killed a white woman.

The Christian Science Monitor website reported on Nov 23, 2021, that the Urban Institute found that homicides with a white perpetrator and a black victim are ten times more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a black perpetrator and a white victim. Human rights violations by prison staff are commonplace.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate and the highest number of incarcerated people in the world. An Associated Press investigation has found that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons is a hotbed of graft, corruption and abuse.

CTV News reported on Nov 14, 2021, that crimes committed by federal prison staff in the United States are not uncommon. Since 2019, more than 100 U.S. federal prison staff members have been arrested and convicted of sexual abuse, murder and other offenses.

Prisoners held in U.S. private prisons are at risk of being abused. The UN News reported on Feb 4, 2021, that in 2019, there were about 116,000 U.S. prisoners held in privately operated facilities, representing about 7 percent of all state prisoners and 16 percent of federal prisoners, quoting data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

On April 20, 2021, nine UN experts, including the UN Human Rights Council Working Group of Experts of People of African Descent, the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the Independent Expert on the Enjoyment of all Human Rights by Older Persons, the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Physical and Mental Health, issued a joint statement condemning U.S. human rights violations against Mumia Abu-Jamal, a prisoner of African descent.

The statement said Abu-Jamal, who has been in prison for 40 years, was a social activist and journalist. The 67-year-old suffers from a number of diseases including chronic heart disease, liver cirrhosis and high blood pressure. In February 2021, he was diagnosed with COVID-19. While receiving treatment for heart failure in late February, he was handcuffed to his hospital bed for four days; and when he was hospitalized again in early April for surgery, his family, lawyers and others were denied access to him.

The statement calls on the U.S. government to comply with its international human rights obligations, take urgent measures to protect AbuJamal’s life and dignity, immediately stop the practice of withholding information, and allow outside visits to monitor his human rights situation.

It also calls on the U.S. government to take all necessary measures to protect the lives of all detainees, especially the elderly and disabled prisoners who are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 outbreak.

The credibility of the U.S. judicial system is in tatters. According to statistics released by the U.S. National Registry of Exoneration on Jan 11, 2022, 2,933 people have been wrongly convicted in the United States since 1989, with a combined 25,600 years of wrongly imposed prison sentences. However, 14 U.S. states lack legal provisions related to compensation for wrongful convictions.

The BBC reported on Nov 23, 2021, that Kevin Strickland, 62, had maintained his innocence since his arrest at the age of 18. He was wrongly convicted of third-degree murder in June 1979, only to be found not guilty in 2021 before being imprisoned for more than 42 years, the longest wrongful imprisonment in Missouri history. But under the state’s law, he is unlikely to receive any financial compensation.

The USA Today website reported on July 8, 2021, that a survey showed that only 17 percent of Americans believe the U.S. criminal justice system treats everyone fairly.

III. PLAYING WITH FAKE DEMOCRACY TRAMPLES ON POLITICAL RIGHTS

Political donations bring about transfers of interests after elections, political polarization further intensifies antagonism and division in the U.S. society, and legislation and gerrymander restricting voting eligibility have become tools for parties to suppress the public opinion. The operation of the U.S. political system is moving away from the public will and social demands, the right of the majority of the public to participate in politics is essentially deprived of, and international confidence in the U.S. democratic system continues to decline.

The American-style democracy has descended to a game of transferring interests. Money politics become increasingly rampant in the United States, which makes politicians more neglectful of people’s interests and demands.

Noam Chomsky, a political commentator and social activist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has pointed out that there is a positive correlation between Americans’ wealth and their influence on policy-making, and for about 70 percent on the income-wealth scale, they have no influence on policy whatsoever and are effectively disenfranchised. Ray La Raja, professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, noted in an article for The Atlantic that America’s current system is democratic only in form, not in substance, as the nominating process is vulnerable to manipulation by plutocrats, celebrities, media figures and activists, while many presidential-primary voters mistakenly back candidates who do not reflect their views.

According to The Guardian on Jan 7, 2021, candidates spent 14 billion U.S. dollars alone on advertising for the 2020 U.S. presidential election cycle. The U.S. Consumer News and Business Channel (CNBC) reported on April 15, 2021, that Wall Street executives, their employees and trade associations invested at least 2.9 billion U.S. dollars into political initiatives during the 2020 election cycle. The U.S. media outlet Politico said on Nov 17, 2021, that a secret-money group “doled out” 410 million U.S. dollars in 2020 to the Democratic Party, aiding the latter’s efforts to win back control of the Senate.

In the 2020 presidential election, U.S. pharmaceutical companies made huge political donations to both parties, and the Democratic administration, after taking office, invested an enormous sum of money back to the companies involved, with Moderna alone earning profit of nearly 1 billion U.S. dollars. The

federal government then funneled interests directly to pharmaceutical companies by purchasing large quantities of COVID-19 vaccines, resulting in massive hoarding and waste of vaccines in the United States. The U.S. government gave pharmaceutical companies a free hand in pricing COVID-19 vaccines, leading to continuous increases in vaccine prices. The Financial Times reported that Pfizer raised the price of its COVID-19 vaccine for the European Union from 15.5 euros to 19.5 euros, and the price of a Moderna jab increased to 25.5 euros from 19 euros. However, the production cost of a Moderna dose is estimated to be less than 3 U.S. dollars.

Political polarization leads to an increasingly divided U.S. society. The election chaos in the United States has further intensified political polarization and continues to tear the society apart. On the afternoon of Jan 6, 2021, prompted by the incitement and manipulation of extreme politicians, tens of thousands of Americans who rejected the 2020 presidential election result flooded to Washington, D.C., and a large number of demonstrators forced their way into the Capitol building and clashed with police, leaving five dead and more than 140 injured. The constitutional process to affirm the presidential election result was interrupted. A Brookings online article in May 2021 indicated that though all 50 states certified the 2020 election results, 77 percent of Republican voters still questioned the legitimacy of the elected president due to allegations of electoral fraud, a phenomenon that happened for the first time in nearly 100 years.

Changes of government did not reduce or remove the political polarization in the United States. The American people are becoming more incompatible with each other over such issues as pandemic prevention and control, race relations, abortion rights and gun control, while the political struggle between Democrats and Republicans over infrastructure construction, social welfare bills, government debt ceiling and other legislation related to the economy and people’s livelihood have become more intense, and the Congress has been nearly dysfunctional. A Republican leader even went so far as to deliver a record 8.5-hour speech in the Congress to block and delay a vote on a Democratic-proposed bill.

The Pew Research Center reported on Oct 13, 2021, that the United States was regarded as the most politically polarized country in a survey involving 17 advanced economies, as 90 percent of the American respondents said there are at least strong conflicts between those who support different parties, and about six-in-ten thought their fellow citizens disagree not only over policies, but also over basic facts.

Confrontations between political parties restrain and harm electors’ right to vote. In order to win elections, Republicans and Democrats used legislation and gerrymander as well as other tactics to aggressively prevent voters who do not favor them from casting a ballot. In 2021, 49 states in the United States introduced more than 420 bills that would restrict voting. These bills either reduced the amount of time voters have to request or mail in a ballot, restricted the availabil

The United States has the highest incarceration rate and the highest number of incarcerated people in the world.

Money politics become increasingly rampant in the United States, which makes politicians more neglectful of people’s interests

and demands.

ity of drop-off locations, imposed stricter signature requirements for mail-in voting, or enacted new and stricter voter-ID requirements, which made mail-in voting and early voting harder and built barriers for the elderly, disabled, minorities and other groups to exercise their voting rights. NBC News reported on March 8, 2021, that the state of Georgia was pushing dozens of restrictive voting bills targeting African American voters. Voting rights experts and civil rights groups have argued that “the movement adds up to a national assault that would push voters of color out of the electorate.”

Gerrymander has become a tool to suppress the political influence of minority voters. The Democratic and Republican parties exploit their political clout in each state to increase the chances of winning by redrawing congressional districts, often at the expense of the rights of minorities.

CNBC reported on Aug 13, 2021, that the practice of redrawing congressional districts often targets voters of color and the gerrymandering in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania alone gave Republicans 16 to 17 more congressional seats. Daily newspaper the Chicago Tribune reported on Sept 3, 2021 that Illinois’ redistricting aimed to keep Democrats in control of the state legislature for at least a decade. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reported on Nov 30, 2021, that the redrawn congressional districts for Ohio give Republicans an unconstitutional partisan advantage, with which the Republicans can anticipate winning 67 percent to 80 percent of the congressional seats — even though they are only likely to obtain about 55 percent of the vote.

The Los Angeles Times reported on Dec 8, 2021, that although Texas has seen a significant increase of the number of people of color, its new redistricting plan intentionally diminished the power of Latino and African American voters. Latino Texans make up nearly 40 percent of the population, but just seven of the 38 congressional districts are predominantly Latino. Texas is home to the largest African American population in the country, but not one of the 38 congressional districts in the state is predominantly black. In a survey of the American public on the fairness of congressional districting, only 16 percent of the surveyed thought that congressional districts would be redrawn fairly in their states.

The international community’s confidence in U.S. democracy

continues to decline. A national poll of America’s 18- to 29-year-olds released on Dec 1, 2021, by the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School showed that only 7 percent of the surveyed viewed the United States as a “healthy democracy,” and 52 percent believed that the American democracy is either “in trouble” or “failing.” Data released by the Pew Research Center in May 2021 indicated that the American public trust in the government neared a historic low since 1958, as only 2 percent of Americans said they can trust the U.S. government to do what is right “just about always,” and only 22 percent said they can trust the government to do what is right “most of the time.”

In an opinion published on June 12, 2021, The Washington Post said that in the past few years the world has been horrified by the chaos, dysfunction and insanity of American democracy, which was seen by U.S. allies as a shattered and washed-up has-been. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said what happened on the Capitol Hill was “disgraceful.” German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said the Capitol riot was “the result of lies and more lies, of divisiveness and contempt for democracy, of hatred and incitement — even from the very highest level.” A research has showed that just 14 percent of Germans and fewer than 10 percent of citizens in New Zealand saw American democracy as a desirable model for other countries.

Despite the fact that the U.S. democracy is proved to be a complete failure and its global image is badly damaged, the U.S. government held the so-called “Leaders’ Summit for Democracy” in a high profile, politicizing democracy and using it as a tool to form cliques and force other countries to take sides, in an attempt to split the world. The socalled “Leaders’ Summit for Democracy” is in essence a summit that undermines global democracy, and has been widely criticized and condemned by the international community.

French political scientist Dominique Moisi said that it is always difficult to preach what one does so badly itself. USA Today, The New York Times, and other American media have also commented that American democracy is “falling apart” and the United States must first address its own failings, and that critics questioned “whether the United States could be an effective advocate for democracy amid problems at home.”