USA: STATE REPRESSION

9th United Nations Universal Periodic Review
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: State Repression
September 14, 2010

While recent years mark key anniversaries in U.S. political and social history, e.g. public accommodation, voting rights, school desegregation, civil rights and anti-war protest landmarks, the protection and advancement of civil and human rights have declined amidst the celebration of these landmark years. The current environment tends to be little more than a cover for law enforcement which has grown increasingly more repressive and hostile to the U.S. Constitution's 1st, 4th, 13th, 14t,h , and 15th Amendments, in addition to international obligations.

The United States has remained true to its longer history of political repression and use of its criminal justice system to quash dissent. In addition, it falls short of meeting its international human rights obligations as provided in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, U.N. treaties which it has ratified, and other international instruments. More specifically, its violations are of basic human rights protected in the International Covention to Eliminate All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Police in the United States, along with other arms of law enforcement, continue to be used to suppress efforts demanding recognition, protection and fulfillment of social and economic human rights; namely, the right to education, health, housing, work, and social security. Such efforts, sought individually and collectively, have, and continue to be primary targets and are met with racial profiling, surveillance, infiltration, provocation, immobilization, arrest, detention, police violence, prosecutorial misconduct, excessive sentences, and death --all with impunity. 1960s Civil Rights Movement activists caught in the government drag net known as COINTELPRO are victims of such misconduct and remain in prison to this day.

Police still routinely make unfounded mass arrests and detentions to keep people off the streets and out of the eye of the media which tends to be accommodating. There is the return of police-initiated violence at demonstrations, arrest of unembedded journalist, and the use of so-called less-lethal weapons against peaceful protesters. These weapons—among them chemical sprays, impact projectiles, and electroshock weapons, cattle-prods of the 1960s—are often associated with fatalities. This practice persists though condemned by several independent panels and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Ongoing and pervasive profiling throughout the United States on the basis of race, immigration status, national origin, religion or ethnicity, under the guise of fighting illegal immigration, drugs, and terrorism, have resulted in increased migrant deaths, mass incarceration and use of torture against African Americans and other persons of color. Law enforcement officers, throughout the country, who have engaged in torture for the purpose of extracting confessions continue to escape prosecution while individuals who were tortured are prosecuted or languish in prison based on the use of coerced confessions in their criminal cases.

In addition to the Abu Ghraib style Chicago Police Torture Cases (Burge Cases) of 1973, is the current case of the San Francisco 8 (SF8). Both are examples of the longstanding domestic use of torture against African Americans by law enforcement officers. The Burge Cases were based on race. The SF8 case is based on race and political beliefs and activities. 30 years ago, Black Panther Party for Self Defense members ( a social justice organization) were tortured over several days, in various ways including electric cattle prods to their genitals, confessed and signed pre-written statements regarding various crimes and the 1971 death of a San Francisco Police officer. In 1974, a federal court ruled that the tainted statements were inadmissible and the charges dismissed. Not only have the perpetrators never been brought to justice, but two of them now serve as agents with the Anti-Terrorist Task Force of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office under the auspices of U.S. Department of Homeland Security and have resurrected the dismissed charges based on the tainted confessions. A violation of article 5(b) and (d) of the Convention guaranteeing the right to be free of excessive force and the rights to freedom of speech, expression, assembly and association.

The Government’s increasing disregard for the U.S. Constitution and its human rights obligations is further displayed in its treatment of Muslim, Arab and South Asian inmates. In 2006 and 2007, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP or “Bureau”) secretly created the Communications Management Unit (CMU), a prison unit designed to hold dangerous terrorists and other high-risk inmates, requiring heightened monitoring of their external and internal communications. Many prisoners, however, are sent to these isolation units for their constitutionally protected religious beliefs, unpopular political views, or in retaliation for challenging poor treatment or other rights violations in the federal prison system. Over two-thirds of the CMU population is Muslim, even though Muslims represent only 6 percent of the general federal prison population.

In 1996, the U.S. government established Special Administrative Measures, or SAMs, to limit the communications of prisoners with an alleged reach and ability to commit violence, now SAMs can be placed on anyone with a “proclivity for violence.” Without criminal conviction, it limits contact and ability to communicate with the outside world – including members of the family. SAMs are being imposed disproportionately on Muslims suspected of connections with terrorism and is typical of how terrorism suspects are being treated in U.S. prisons and courts.

RECOMMENDATION FOR ACTION BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

1. Take leadership role to insure creation of public education and protections afforded underU.S. Constitution and international treaties and conventions are applied vigorously.
2. Adopt and ratify all major treaties and conventions, without RUDs.
3. Commute the sentences and release all U.S. Political Prisoners/Prisoners of War (PP/POWs) and exiles from the COINTELPRO/Civil Rights Era immediately and unconditionally.
4. The United States must institute an Executive Review of all cases involving those imprisoned as a result of COINTELPRO and adopt the necessary measures to ensure the right of COINTELPRO PP/POWs/Exiles to seek just and adequate reparation and satisfaction to redress acts of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and to design effective measures to prevent the repetition of such acts.
5. That Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier, at a minimum, be afforded a new trial.

INFO: US Human Rights Network go to: http://www.ushrnetwork.org/upr_reports .