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The US Congress should provide the Pentagon with resources to conduct information campaigns that would identify human rights violations by China and Russia.
This was a proposal by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a report named “Human Rights in a Shifting Landscape: Recommendations for Congress,” published on September 9th.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is an organization that provides expert support to the US Congress and is partially sponsored by the government.
Thus, the CSIC suggested that, the US, which continues selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, which is by no means a democracy, “plays by the rules,” while Russia and China don’t.
“First, strategic competitors such as China and Russia do not play by the same rule set as the United States. China and Russia are willing to sell arms and broker security partnerships with other countries while blind to their type of governance or respect for human rights. Russia has deliberately struck civilian targets in Syria in support of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s efforts to retake and consolidate territory. China is conducting large-scale incarceration and persecution of its Muslim Uyghur population.”
The US analysts argue that Moscow and Beijing allegedly see authoritarianism as an alternative to democracy and seek to “bring civil society to oblivion.” The United States is essentially pretending as as protecting human rights in order to criticize countries that have fallen out of its favor, or are its direct competitors.
According to the report, the US should make more efforts to protect human rights around the world and demonstrate leadership in this matter amid the strengthening of authoritarianism.
At the same time, experts of the center believe that authoritarianism is gaining strength, including allegedly due to the actions of China and Russia.
According to analysts, Congress should allocate resources to the US Department of Defense for information operations that will identify “violations of human rights and civil liberties” by Moscow and Beijing.
The list of recommendations to the US Congress includes:
- Press the U.S. administration to prioritize and fully resource programming that advances good governance, human rights, and humanitarian principles. This, according to the report should be done in two ways:
- By “promoting liberty, freedom, and forms of governance similar to our own in regions where China and Russia seek to compete—as this strengthens our alliances.”
- And that is achieved through “both information operations that expose competitors’ disregard for human dignity and an affirmative set of policies and programming that advance human rights.”
To be fair, it also suggests that support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen should be discontinued:
- “Make U.S. arms transfers contingent on compliance with international humanitarian and human rights law;”
- “Require the integration of Leahy vetting and broader human rights criteria into assessment, monitoring, and evaluation planning and process for both DoD and State security cooperation and security assistance.”
Human rights are quickly turning into a weapon that the US seeks to employ.
It is likely that these recommendations, at least some of them would be followed through on, namely the ones focused on Russia, China, Iran, North Korea.
The ones focused on Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Israel, those can wait.
Of course, examples of Russia and China’s misadventures in supporting “authoritarianism” are presented. For Russia – participation in the Syrian conflict and assisting the legitimate government led by President Bashar al-Assad. Moscow is also accused of allegedly striking civilian targets.
“Russia intentionally attacked civilian targets in Syria to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his efforts to return and unite the territory,” they assure.
Moscow has repeatedly denied such allegations. According to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the Russian air forces take all the necessary precautions so as not to cause damage to civilian objects and civilians.
The ones who are mostly disregarding human rights and international law is, in fact, the US.
In particular, at the end of August, the Russian Center for the Reconciliation of the warring parties reported that the United States, in violation of the agreements with Turkey and Russia, without warning launched an air strike on objects in the Idlib de-escalation zone, which led to numerous destruction and casualties.
The tendency to weaponize human rights is just beginning, but it is potentially just a matter of time until others that have fallen out of grace are accused of such misconduct. After all, how dare they purchase their arms from anybody other than the US?
MORE ON THE TOPIC:
The pot calling the kettle black https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unrest_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_riots#Civil_Rights_and_Black_Power_Movement's_Period:_1955%E2%80%931977
Indeed, the so-called western human rights hypocrite champions, led by the genocidal Americunt murderers are supposed to lecture other civilized nations on how to behave. Americunts violent racist criminals have killed more innocent people since WW2 than the whole world combined from Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Africa, Latin America, you name it.
you have to understand them, westerner elites sometimes “innocently” confuse “human rights” and “right on humans”
They always have these talks about muh humyn raits, the rights of the individual and all that but never talks about human duties. -)
Human rights and the following individualism is a sophisticated political tool to divide family, society and country, isolating people in single vulnerable minority groups or in simple loners, as easy targets for Wall Streets predators.
But after 20 years China, Russia and Iran seems to have caught it, and the Washington and British administration look more and more desperate in their internal illusionary world far from reality.
Anyone who reads the 30 Articles enumerated in the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights will recognize, immediately, that China’s human rights record is far, far better than the USA’s or the EU’s. Of the 30 Articles in the Declaration, China leads 26-2, with two draws.
Yet, though China leads the US, it does not criticize other countries behavior or judge their domestic policies. http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
Here’s Jimmy Carter’s take:
“THE United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.
Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended. This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues.
While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past. With leadership from the United States, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” This was a bold and clear commitment that power would no longer serve as a cover to oppress or injure people, and it established equal rights of all people to life, liberty, security of person, equal protection of the law and freedom from torture, arbitrary detention or forced exile.
The declaration has been invoked by human rights activists and the international community to replace most of the world’s dictatorships with democracies and to promote the rule of law in domestic and global affairs. It is disturbing that, instead of strengthening these principles, our government’s counterterrorism policies are now clearly violating at least 10 of the declaration’s 30 articles, including the prohibition against “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Recent legislation has made legal the president’s right to detain a person indefinitely on suspicion of affiliation with terrorist organizations or “associated forces,” a broad, vague power that can be abused without meaningful oversight from the courts or Congress (the law is currently being blocked by a federal judge). This law violates the right to freedom of expression and to be presumed innocent until proved guilty, two other rights enshrined in the declaration.
Secret ‘Kill List’ Tests Obama’s Principles MAY 29, 2012 In addition to American citizens’ being targeted for assassination or indefinite detention, recent laws have canceled the restraints in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to allow unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications. Popular state laws permit detaining individuals because of their appearance, where they worship or with whom they associate.
Despite an arbitrary rule that any man killed by drones is declared an enemy terrorist, the death of nearby innocent women and children is accepted as inevitable. After more than 30 airstrikes on civilian homes this year in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has demanded that such attacks end, but the practice continues in areas of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen that are not in any war zone. We don’t know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these attacks, each one approved by the highest authorities in Washington. This would have been unthinkable in previous times.
These policies clearly affect American foreign policy. Top intelligence and military officials, as well as rights defenders in targeted areas, affirm that the great escalation in drone attacks has turned aggrieved families toward terrorist organizations, aroused civilian populations against us and permitted repressive governments to cite such actions to justify their own despotic behavior.
Meanwhile, the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, now houses 169 prisoners. About half have been cleared for release, yet have little prospect of ever obtaining their freedom. American authorities have revealed that, in order to obtain confessions, some of the few being tried (only in military courts) have been tortured by waterboarding more than 100 times or intimidated with semiautomatic weapons, power drills or threats to sexually assault their mothers. Astoundingly, these facts cannot be used as a defense by the accused, because the government claims they occurred under the cover of “national security.” Most of the other prisoners have no prospect of ever being charged or tried either.
At a time when popular revolutions are sweeping the globe, the United States should be strengthening, not weakening, basic rules of law and principles of justice enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But instead of making the world safer, America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends.
As concerned citizens, we must persuade Washington to reverse course and regain moral leadership according to international human rights norms that we had officially adopted as our own and cherished throughout the years.
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, is the founder of the Carter Center and the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/opinion/americas-shameful-human-rights-record.html
The Center for Strategic and International Studies is run by the decendent of a Ukrainian Jew.