Amnesty International's
U.S. Campaign

On October 22 marchers in fifty cities around the country protested police brutality. Their cause finds strong support in the latest campaign of Amnesty International. The London-based world human rights monitor, which has focused on nations comfortably far away from these shores during its thirty-seven-year history, has this time made the United States the target. It recently issued a 153-page report on human rights abuses in this country, 'Rights for All', which is recommended reading for those who think they have heard it all about police violence, brutish prisons, harsh detention of immigrants in America. By drawing together a variety of types of violations the document packs a cumulative wallop. Reading of horrendous conditions in US prisons when described in the same cool, objective way that AI chronicles violations in a distant banana republic can be sobering. Some findings:

* The US prison and jail population has tripled between 1980 and 1996, to 1.7 million. More than 60 percent of inmates are minorities- half are black. More than 3,500 children are housed in prisons with adults, in violation of international standards. Pregnant prisoners in labor are routinely taken to the hospital in shackles. Although prohibited by international law, many prisons use chains or leg irons in transporting or punishing prisoners.

* In 1997 the United States executed more people- seventy-four-than any country in the world except Saudi Arabia, China and Iran. The United States has 3,300 prisoners on death row, forty-three of them women, 42 percent of them black. Mentally impaired people and people who committed murder when they were under 18 are sentenced to death, contrary to international standards (100 countries have abolished the death penalty).

* US police inflict torture and sometimes death on prisoners with electroshock weapons-stun guns, stun belts, tasers-which emit up to 50,000 volts of electricity. (These devices are banned in Canada and most Western European countries). At least 3,000 US police departments use pepper spray, which has killed some sixty people. Many police departments and prison systems apply potentially lethal forms of restraint, like choke holds, four-point restraint chairs and hog-tying.

* Political asylum seekers are indefinitely detained, in violation of international standards on refugees.

* The United States imposes hobbling reservations on certain international human rights treaties it has ratified' e.g., the Convention Against Torture; and has failed to ratify others such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child. AI proposes a series of reforms to bring the US human rights record up to international standards.

For information on the US campaign, call (212) 807-8400; (202) 544-0200.

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