China and Korea to issue Human Rights Record of US

These posts are submitted for your consideration with the perspective of frontrunner for the Democratic Party's candidate for president John Kerry's recent accusation that the Bush administration is "alienating all of our [political] friends" and "fueling anti-American sentiment around the world."

While Human Rights monitoring and support is a critically necessary endeavor in a globalized environment, the arrogance with which America dishes out censure while the current administration's foreign policies are backfiring like a hookered Harley, demonstrates the escalating lack of perspective and the obnoxious centricity that accounts for the alarming deterioration of American credibility on the world stage. China's response to these annual "reports" has typically been public indignation. This year,they're responding in kind, with a resounding me-too from Korea.

The major problem with the continuing American finger-pointing is not that reports about human rights abuses in themselves are unfair. It is imperative that human rights abuses, oversights and policies be challenged and this is not to say that China's record is exemplary in this respect. The problem is that America no longer has the moral authority to pontificate and continuing to do so allows those painfully real issues of human trafficking, the suppression of political dissent, abysmal and unsafe working conditions for miners and factory workers in developing countries to now take a back seat to nationalistic brickbatting. Grow up, America.

BEIJING, Feb. 27 (Xinhuanet) -- The Information Office of the State Council of China will issue on March 1 the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2003, in response to the latter's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices which contains "many distortions and denouncements".

It will be the fifth Chinese report in response to the annual country reports on human rights by the United States in five consecutive years.

An official with the Information Office said that the United States, as in previous years, acted again as "the world human rights police" by distorting the human right situations in more than 190 countries and regions across the world, including China.

However, the reports released by the US State Department on Wednesday once again "omitted" its own long-standing malpractice and problems of human rights. "Therefore, we have to, as before, help the United States keep its own human rights record," said the official.

The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2003, based on a great many facts, is divided into six parts, covering life, freedom and personal safety of the US citizens, their political rights and freedom, the living conditions of workers, racial discrimination, conditions for women, children and elderly people,as well as its infringements on the human rights of other nations.

Korea Seconds the Motion

With even stronger language, Korea, whom we now want to convince to disarm their nuclear program, responds in kind. Having followed the six-party talks last week in Beijing on this issue, I have to wonder if they would have been more productive without the presence and and arguable influence of the United States.

DPRK refutes US accusation of human rights abuses

PYONGYANG, Feb. 28 (Xinhuanet) -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Saturday condemned the United States' accusation of human rights abuses by the DPRK.

Answering a question by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), a spokesman for the DPRK Foreign Ministry described the US accusation in its annual report on human rights released Wednesday as "disgusting behavior."

"The US is an international strangler of democracy and the world's worst violator of human rights," the spokesman said.

The United States is "committing genocide in various parts of the world, imposing economic sanctions and war upon those countries and advancing along the road of independence by fabricating false intelligence and hatching plots," the spokesman added.

The spokesman said the US intention was to tar the DPRK's image by adding the human rights issue to the nuclear issue and isolate the DPRK.