US Quietly Breaks UN Treaty

Published on Tuesday, February 26, 2008 by The Huffington Post

US Quietly Breaks UN Treaty

by Leslie Griffith

On Friday, at a United Nations meeting in Geneva, the United States broke a series of legal promises. Keeping those promises would have proved extremely embarrassing to the United States government by pointing out that human rights abuses are being committed here at home, and at U.S. military installations abroad.

In 1994 the United States senate ratified the U.N. Convention on Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination promising to provide reports every two years on racial discrimination in the United States. The reports were to include anywhere in the world where the U.S. military is in charge. In other words, the United States military no matter where it was on the globe, agreed to report discrimination. That now includes Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

The treaty is the “supreme law of the land” under the U.S. Constitution, article 6, clause 2. Every nation that signed the treaty was charged with giving a national report on such basic areas of discrimination as health care, education, and prison terms. According to the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute and the National Lawyers Guild, the United States on Friday presented a report to the United Nations Committee, never mentioning Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, or the behavior of U.S. corporations working under U.S. military contracts.

Instead, U.S. officials presented facts on the federal level explaining (for instance) how much money was given to education, how much money was supplied to prisons etc. Only four states: Oregon, Illinois, New Mexico and South Carolina were mentioned, and officials in those states who were contacted by local activists, say they never received any phone calls of inquiry by government officials.

At least one hundred human rights groups were represented in Geneva on Friday anxious to hear what the government had to say about racism here at home and abroad.

According to the founder of the Meiklejohn Institute, Ann Fagan Ginger, her organization’s independent report also delivered in Geneva on Friday, provides statistics on racism toward Katrina victims, as well as discrepancies in life expectancy and other health care problems among African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and Native Americans. In regard to U.S. military interrogation centers, Wayne county circuit court judge Claudia Morcom, (ret.) representing the Meiklejohn Institute, told U.N. officials in Geneva what the world now knows.

The basic racism practiced by the U.S. military in both Abu Ghraib and in the detention centers of Guantanamo includes torture, degradation, and illegal detention of hundreds of prisoners in these two facilities based on race, nationality, ethnicity and religions of those arrested.

Meiklejohn founder, attorney Ann Fagan Ginger wrote,”There is no way any U.S. citizen will be safe, even if Caucasian and native born, if the United States government can treat human beings as the U.S. military has treated the men it sent to those two facilities.”

To view the reports, go to www.mcli.org

Leslie Griffith has been a journalist in newspaper, radio and television for 25 years. She is currently working on a book about corporate censorship of the media called Shut-up and Read.

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