UN report documents torture, police violence in US

The United Nations Committee Against Torture issued a lengthy report today assessing the performance of the 156 countries whose governments have ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which took effect two decades ago.

The report subjected a major country to a wide-ranging critique, indicting it for a long list of human rights violations including:

• Refusal to prosecute officials who engage in or sanction torture of prisoners
• Detaining prisoners indefinitely without trial or other judicial proceeding, or any hope of release
• Kidnapping individuals overseas and torturing them in secret prisons
• Approving a manual for interrogation of prisoners that includes methods classified as torture under the Geneva Conventions
• Imprisoning immigrants under degrading conditions and refusing to acknowledge their claims as refugees fleeing persecution
• Imposing the death penalty on hundreds of prisoners, many of them from oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, many of them demonstrably innocent or unfairly tried
• Widespread use of solitary confinement, considered a form of torture, at all levels of the prison system
• Severe abuse of juveniles, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups both in police custody and in prisons
• Maintaining a regime of police violence, particularly against young men from racial and ethnic minorities, and refusing to restrain or punish police who kill, wound or torture

It will not come as any surprise to readers of the WSWS that the country named is not China, or Russia, or Iran, or some other target of the American ruling class, but the US itself. The government that claims the right to bully, blockade, and attack any country in the world in the name of “human rights” and “democracy” is guilty of the most heinous crimes.

The language of the report is both cautious and bureaucratic, and there are strained efforts to congratulate the Obama administration on alleged improvements, compared to the Bush administration, on such practices as extraordinary rendition and waterboarding. But the overall impact of this indictment is damning.

There are some significant revelations. The committee notes that the US government had filed reservations to the Convention on Torture at the time of ratification, indicating that some practices condemned by the treaty would continue, and that the Obama administration has refused to alter this “restrictive interpretation” of the anti-torture treaty or introduce a prohibition of torture into federal law.

The Obama administration has revoked Bush administration legal opinions declaring that waterboarding and other forms of torture were permissible, but it has not done the same to Bush-era claims that the US is obliged to observe international norms only at facilities within US borders, not at detention facilities on the soil of other countries. In other words, the legal basis for torture at secret CIA and military prisons still remains fully in effect.

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