Does America Have a Human Rights Problem?

This article is a sidebar to the Lands of Liberty 2000 report.

In addition to its survey of world liberty, this year's Freedom House volume also contains an excellent essay-"Does America Have a Human Rights Problem?"- written by Arch Puddington, vice-president for research at Freedom House. He notes that, contrary to his own organization's findings, "both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued a series reports which castigate America." Indeed, at the 1999 session of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International listed the United States as a major human rights priority, along with Algeria, Cambodia, and the region of Africa encompassing Rwanda and Burundi.

"What accounts for this upsurge of concern over the American record," Puddington asks. And he answers: "To its critics, the U.S. is not a country where special rights have been adopted for those who might conceivably suffer discrimination, but a cheerless place where the individual is at the mercy of a pitiless market economy and a brutal police regime. . . . [It is] a society where heavy demands are placed on the individual."

But "two issues in particular have drawn the attention of the human rights community. The first involves the methods America has chosen to wage its war on crime. The second is discrimination against nonwhites, or, to place the matter in a broader and more appropriate context, the country's efforts to build a successful multinational society." In essence, Puddington says, global human-rights organizations are using their prestige to argue that non-Leftist approaches to these two social problems are not merely mistaken but violations of civil liberties. As I noted in the March issue of Navigator, the pan-European courts in Luxembourg and Strasbourg are being used for the same end.

Thus, with regard to crime, Puddington notes that Americans have chosen several tactics for fighting that problem-the death penalty; long, mandatory sentences; zero-tolerance policing-that their critics declare to be human-rights violations. But the fact is that America's crime rate is falling, while Leftist Europe's is rising. Thus, critics of America's anti-crime tactics have not demonstrated that they can obtain the same results by means more to their liking.

Nor is this a case where the human rights lies on one side and administrative convenience on the other. As Puddington says: "If we have learned anything over the past thirty years, it is that high levels of crime, or the public perception that crime is out of control, can present an even greater danger to democracy, the rule of law, and human rights than the abuse of power by the authorities or draconian sentencing policies."

With regard to ethnic discrimination, Puddington writes:

The charge advanced by one well-known human-rights organization that the U.S. is undergoing a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment is patently false. . . . [But] if America has not become hostile to legal immigrants, it is also true that many people are concerned over evidence that some of the newer immigrant groups were resisting assimilation into the broader American culture. . . . [This] notion that some immigrant groups were resistant to becoming "American" was fortified by immigrant constituency organizations, which sometimes spoke disparagingly of assimilation and pressed for government policies which would encourage immigrants to retain their cultural identities. . . . Immigrants bring many benefits to a society such as the United States. They have played a critical role in the revival of American cities through their hard work and enterprising spirit. . . . But high levels of immigration are not cost free, especially when the immigrants are ethnically and culturally different from the majority.

Again, human-rights organizations claim America's approach to these problems violates civilized norms. But the European Left's alternative has been to deny there are problems associated with immigration and then blame their country's citizenry for thinking otherwise.