Human rights in the United States

Some of this conceptualization may have arisen from the significant Quaker segment of the population in the colonies, especially in the Delaware Valley, and their religious views that all human beings, regardless of sex, age, race, or other characteristics, had the same Inner light.

[citation needed] Over the years, a variety of claimants sought to assert that discrimination against women in voting, in property ownership, in occupational license, and other matters was unconstitutional given the Constitution's use of the term "Person", but the all-male courts did not give this fair hearing.

Certainly there were already some domestic political attempts, as for example President Truman's Committee on Civil rights, which authored a report in 1947 initializing the possibility to apply the UN charter in order to combat racial discrimination in the US.

[37] Beginning in 1965, the United States also began a program of affirmative action that not only obliges employers not to discriminate, but requires them to provide preferences for groups protected under the Civil Rights Act to increase their numbers where they are judged to be underrepresented.

[48] According to the report of HRW, The patchwork of healthcare coverage in the Trump administration caused the loss of insurance for many women and girls who are at risk of deadly diseases such as gynecological cancer.

U.S. District Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan ruled that the First Amendment does not insulate Time magazine reporters from a requirement to testify before a criminal grand jury that's conducting the investigation into the possible illegal disclosure of classified information.

[88] On June 30, 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of ten people who are either U.S. citizens or legal residents of the U.S., challenging the constitutionality of the government's "no-fly" list.

The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution forbids unreasonable search and seizure without a warrant, but some administrations have claimed exceptions to this rule to investigate alleged conspiracies against the government.

[124] Among the 56 countries categorized as 'Very high' on the Human Development Index, it is one of only 12 that retain the death penalty (the others being Singapore, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Belarus, Kuwait, Qatar, Malaysia, and Taiwan).

[143] The American Bar Association also sponsors a project aimed at abolishing the death penalty in the United States,[144] criticizing the US's execution of minors and the mentally disabled and arguing that the US fails to adequately protect the rights of the innocent.

In McCleskey v. Kemp, for example, it was alleged the capital sentencing process was administered in a racially discriminatory manner in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

[151][152] The ACLU[153] and advocacy group RSOL[154][155][156] also believe that measures against sex offenders are inhumane and that current legislation violates the constitutional rights of those with a legal obligation to register.

[165] Human Rights Watch, for instance, has argued that "the extraordinary rate of incarceration in the United States wreaks havoc on individuals, families and communities, and saps the strength of the nation as a whole.

[180] They found that some juveniles had been incarcerated awaiting trial for a long time - up to two years, subjected to the same treatment as adult inmates, and were at greater risk of assault, abuse, or death.

[186] In 2001, The New York Times reported that the U.S. government is unable or unwilling to collect statistics showing the precise number of people killed by the police or the prevalence of the use of excessive force.

[217] Critics have argued that qualified immunity makes it unnecessarily difficult to sue public officials for misconduct, including civil rights violations;[218] this has been implicated in particular for enabling police brutality.

For example, numerous academics and journalists, among them J. Patrice McSherry and Vincent Bevins, have documented significant US support for right-wing dictatorships, state terrorism, and mass killings during the Cold War.

[259] However, the United States Government has categorized a large number of people as unlawful combatants, a classification which denies the privileges of prisoner of war (POW) designation of the Geneva Conventions.

[265] Bertrand Ramcharan, the acting UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, stated that while the removal of Saddam Hussein represented "a major contribution to human rights in Iraq" and that the United States had condemned the conduct at Abu Ghraib and pledged to bring violators to justice, "willful killing, torture and inhuman treatment" represented a grave breach of international law and "might be designated as war crimes by a competent tribunal".

[267] In their report The Road to Abu Ghraib, Human Rights Watch states:[268] The [Bush] administration effectively sought to re-write the Geneva Conventions of 1949 to eviscerate many of their most important protections.

These include the rights of all detainees in an armed conflict to be free from humiliating and degrading treatment, as well as from torture and other forms of coercive interrogation...[M]ethods included holding detainees in painful stress positions, depriving them of sleep and light for prolonged periods, exposing them to extremes of heat, cold, noise and light, hooding, and depriving them of all clothing...Concern for the basic rights of persons taken into custody in Afghanistan and Iraq did not factor into the Bush administration's agenda.

[274][275] Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, concurred by stating, in a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, that he believes waterboarding violates Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

[280] These memos were accompanied by the Justice Department's release of four Bush-era legal opinions covering (in graphic and extensive detail) the interrogation of 14 high-value terror detainees using harsh techniques beyond waterboarding.

According to Amnesty International: The Guantánamo Bay detention camp has become a symbol of the United States administration's refusal to put human rights and the rule of law at the heart of its response to the atrocities of September 11, 2001.

It has become synonymous with the United States executive's pursuit of unfettered power, and has become firmly associated with the systematic denial of human dignity and resort to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that has marked the U.S.'s detentions and interrogations in the "war on terror".

[301][302][303][304] In a process known as extraordinary rendition, foreign nationals have been captured and abducted outside of the United States and transferred to secret US-administered detention facilities, sometimes being held incommunicado for months or years.

"[306] In November 2001, Yaser Esam Hamdi, a U.S. citizen, was captured by Afghan Northern Alliance forces in Konduz, Afghanistan, amongst hundreds of surrendering Taliban fighters and was transferred into U.S. custody.

In 2004, in the case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld the U.S. Supreme court reversed the dismissal of a habeas corpus petition and ruled detainees who are U.S. citizens must have the ability to challenge their detention before an impartial judge.

[309] According to the Human Rights Watch report (September 2012) the United States government during the U.S. President Bush republican administration "waterboarding" tortured opponents of Muammar Gaddafi during interrogations, then transferred them to mistreatment in Libya.

[334][failed verification] On 9 November 2020, during the 3.5 -hour session at the UN's main human rights body, the United States came under scrutiny for the first time in five years, regarding the detention of migrant children and the killings of unarmed Black people during Donald Trump’s tenure.