Pubdate: Mon, 5 Oct 1998
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Contact:  http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Page: 2
Author: Barbara Crossette

AMNESTY FINDS 'WIDESPREAD PATTERN' OF U.S. RIGHTS VIOLATIONS

Amnesty International, in its first campaign directed at any Western
nation, intends to publish a harsh report on the United States on Tuesday,
saying U.S. police forces and criminal and legal systems have "a persistent
and widespread pattern of human rights violations."

Amnesty International, the 37-year-old human rights organization based in
London, plans to make its report the focus of a yearlong effort in more
than 100 countries and in international bodies like the United Nations to
protest what it calls a U.S. failure "to deliver the fundamental promise of
rights for all."

The report is part of a growing effort among human rights organizations to
seek "balance" in reporting by looking at industrialized as well as
developing nations. The Clinton administration has encouraged that trend
more than its predecessors, welcoming monitors from the U.N. Human Rights
Commission in the face of sharp criticism from some members of Congress.

But U.S. officials and U.S human rights groups that are also often critical
have had mixed reactions to some international reports, describing some as
selective or lacking in nuance and context and often deliberately excluding
background information on civil rights protections in the United States.

The new Amnesty report is bound to be among the most controversial of the
recent surveys. Officials in New York, which figures prominently, and in
Washington declined to comment because they had not seen the report.

The 150-page report pulls together widely reported cases of abuses around
the United States and incorporates the work of U.S. advocacy groups and
Amnesty investigations. Without responses from U.S. officials, it concludes
with this statement:

"Across the country thousands of people are subjected to sustained and
deliberate brutality at the hands of police officers. Cruel, degrading and
sometimes life-threatening methods of constraint continue to be a feature
of the U.S. criminal justice system."

The report also condemns what is sees as a general failure to punish
offending officials. It criticizes the treatment of people who seek asylum
by U.S. immigration authorities and calls, as Amnesty has done in the past,
for the abolition of the death penalty, which the report says is "often
enacted in vengeance, applied in an arbitrary manner, subject to bias
because of the defendant's race or economic status, or driven by the
political ambitions of those who oppose it."

Pierre Sane, a development expert from Senegal who has been secretary
general of Amnesty International for six years, said in an interview that
the United States was chosen as the first Western target because human
rights conditions were deteriorating.

"We felt it was ironic that the most powerful country in the world uses
international human rights laws to criticize others," Sane said, "but does
not apply the same standards at home."

Sane does not deny that the report, some of it in strong, often polemical
language, seems to hold government officials more responsible for
violations than the individuals who exceed their authority in committing
abuses.

"Responsibility to uphold human rights lays with the federal government,
lays with the Congress, lays with authorities in the different states," he
said. "I think that what our research has found is a generalized failure of
the systems of monitoring, of accountability for the police, for the prison
guards, for immigration officials."

The report criticizes the United States for failing to sign international
rights conventions, among them the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Sane said it was not relevant that some countries that had signed the
convention did not act against abuses of children, as in southern Asia,
where more than 50 million children are thought to be forced to work, many
of them in bonded labor.

"The covenant is extremely important, because the covenant represents a
consensus of all nations," he said. "That a country does not respect its
laws once it becomes part of the covenant is another problem."

Sane said the purpose of the Amnesty campaign against the United States was
"to raise awareness of the need to take action."

"I think in terms of the severity of what is happening in the U.S., more or
less people are aware," Sane said. "They are aware that in the States
police can be brutal. They're aware that prisons are not the best place to
be in. But what we are concerned with is the lack of action and the
complacency.

"It seems to me that the international community, in terms of standards, is
moving really ahead of the standards obtained in the United States today." 
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Checked-by: Mike Gogulski