Should the State Department get out of the human-rights reporting business?
I almost missed this (h/t Peggy McGuinness at Opinio Juris). Shortly after the U.S. State Department released its annual report on respect for human rights around the world, China responded with its own report on the state of human rights in the United States, which appears to have focused on the prevalence of crime and ...
I almost missed this (h/t Peggy McGuinness at Opinio Juris). Shortly after the U.S. State Department released its annual report on respect for human rights around the world, China responded with its own report on the state of human rights in the United States, which appears to have focused on the prevalence of crime and guns:
One out of every five people is a victim of a crime in the United States every year, said the report.
The United States reports the world' s highest incidence of violent crimes, and its people's lives, properties and personal security are not duly protected, the report said.
I almost missed this (h/t Peggy McGuinness at Opinio Juris). Shortly after the U.S. State Department released its annual report on respect for human rights around the world, China responded with its own report on the state of human rights in the United States, which appears to have focused on the prevalence of crime and guns:
One out of every five people is a victim of a crime in the United States every year, said the report.
The United States reports the world’ s highest incidence of violent crimes, and its people’s lives, properties and personal security are not duly protected, the report said.
In 2009, an estimated 4.3 million violent crimes, 15.6 million property crimes and 133,000 personal thefts were committed against US residents aged 12 or older, and the violent crime rate was 17.1 victimizations per 1,000 persons, said the report, quoting figures from the US Department of Justice.
The United States also ranks first in the world in terms of the number of privately-owned guns and had high incidence of gun-related crimes, said the report, noting that the United States exercised lax control on the already rampant gun ownership.
There’s no doubt that the Congresionally-mandated State Department human rights report aggravates lots of governments–including those considerably more virtuous than China’s. They likely force American diplomats to have all sorts of awkward conversations with their counterparts. It’s easy to see the whole exercise as holier-than-thou preening that alienates even countries sympathetic to the cause.
The diplomatic blowback might be worth the price if the report gets results that other, more independent human rights monitoring doesn’t. Does it? Rightly or wrongly, anything these report says is seen through the lens of U.S. strategic interest and can be dismissed as political meddling in a way that a Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International report cannot (it helps of course that those organizations are often harshly critical of the United States).
In an age of well-funded human rights NGOs and growing scrutiny by international bodies, it’s worth asking whether the State Department reports are worth the diplomatic trouble.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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