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We feel that the United States is violation of the following articles, for the following reasons:
Article 2.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Violation: As reported in the NY Times, the Bush Administration has begun to monitor the activities of Iraqis inside the United States. According to senior government officials, the intelligence program involves tracking thousands of Iraqi citizens and Iraqi-Americans with dual citizenship who attend American universities or work at private U.S. companies. Some of the targets of the operation are being electronically monitored under the authority of national security warrants and efforts are underway to recruit others as informants. If American forces invade Iraq, the effort would be intensified through detentions and arrests of Iraqis or Iraqi sympathizers.
A further violation of Article 2 can be seen in INS practices post 9-11, where international students have to meet much stricter requirements and are scrutinized to a much higher degree. This includes the FBI and INS creating a database of all such students, specifically tracking them, and even limiting what classes they are allowed to take.
In addition, the Justice Department has announced yesterday that it will require thousands of students, workers and other men from five Muslim countries who are temporarily residing in the United States to be fingerprinted and photographed, the latest step in its program to register visitors from countries linked to terrorism. Article 3.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Violation: The INS, in conjunction with the FBI, has been responsible for thousands of detentions since September 11, all without hearings or due process. Some people have even been detained for protesting the detentions of family members. Most of these detentions have been done in secret, without people's names being released, and in many cases, with detainees being moved far away from their families and base of support (ie. one detainee from the Northeast, after some investigation into his case, was moved to another prison somewhere in the Southwest).
Article 5.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Violation: In complete violation of the Geneva Convention, the United States government is illegally holding prisoners-of-war from Afghanistan in legal limbo in Guatanomo Bay in Cuba. Images of blindfolded prisoners kneeling shackled by wire cages at Guatanomo Bay have ignited international controversy. The use of restraints, covered goggles, ear muffs and face masks has raised fears that the US is mistreating suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners. The prisoners are being detained in temporary open-sided wire cells. Sized 1.8m by 2.4m, these have been described as 'kennels' and 'cages' by critics and dubbed 'a scandal' by a Human Rights Watch spokesman. The prisoners are not shackled when they are inside their cells, but when they are moved around the camp, for showers or exercise, they are restrained at a 'level appropriate for the person' - which may include hand and leg shackles.
Article 6.
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Violation: See explanation of violations of Article 2.
Article 8.
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
Violation: See explanation of Article 5.
Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Violation: See explanation of Article 3.
A further violation of this article was exemplified by the actions of the Washington, DC Metro Police on September 27. Several hundred people were blocked in Pershing Park for more than two hours by D.C. police and U.S. Park Police and then arrested. Some said they spent several hours on a bus waiting for processing after their arrest and an additional 12 hours handcuffed in a Southwest police facility. District police, the city and federal authorities obviously violated the constitutional rights of these people, who, while in police custody, were held in abusive conditions. For example, some of those arrested reported being shackled wrist to ankle for over 12 hours. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a lawyer with the Partnership for Civil Justice, a District-based law firm that has filed a suit in relation to these illegal arrests, has said, "The government illegally trapped, detained and arrested a lawful assembly of people, as well as others who had come out to hear the messages of the protests." She went on to say that the purpose of the arrests was to take protesters off the streets, and to gain as much information on activists by way of mugshots, fingerprinting, and gathering of personal information.
Article 10.
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Violation: Post-September 11th, President George W. Bush declared that the United States is now immersed in such an "extraordinary emergency" that secret military tribunals will try various foreign terrorist suspects who are arrested either in this country or abroad. The president himself will decide who is so tried and who isn't, and the rules of procedure, including standards required for conviction, will be established by the Secretary of Defense. Some of the offenses for which defendants will be tried will be capital, and there will be no judicial review. The president's decision was defended by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who told the press, "Foreign terrorists who commit war crimes against the United States, in my judgment, are not entitled to and do not deserve the protections of the American Constitution, particularly when there could be very serious and important reasons related to not bringing them back to the United States for justice." This presupposes that those being tried by the tribunals are guilty - an assumption completely opposite of our laws which have always assumed that defendants are innocent until proved guilty. It also misses one of the main purposes of constitutional protections, which is not merely to protect the rights of the individual but also to restrain the government itself.
Article 11.
(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
Violation: See explanation of article 10.
Further, the way the mass media is run today, and considering who owns it (corporations), there is no presumption of innocence. As someone posted on Infoshop.org, "Our mass media is basically an outlet to push whatever programs, wars, etc. the top politicians in the US government wants. They focus on those intensely, barely covering any other news at all. To keep an illusion of them being somehow "free" they occassionally have people who barely disagree on [the news], and who disagree in weak ways..."
Article 12.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Violation: With the passage of the Patriot Act, it was made much easier for law enforcement officials to spy on us. The police now have the power to perform "No Knowledge" searches on people's property. This means that law enforcement does not need to inform you that they have a warrant, nor do you need to be present for them to search your property. Law enforcement officials can search when you are not present, and are not obligated to tell you that they did so. The police are also now able to perform "No Knock" searches - police no longer have to knock and alert you that they possess a warrant. Instead, they can just kick down your door and enter the premises. In addition, warrants are no longer needed for wire-taps.
A much scarier violation of this article is the creation of the Total Information Awareness program and database. John Poindexter, yes the same person convicted in 1990 of five felony counts of lying to Congress, destroying official documents and obstructing congressional inquiries into the Iran-contra affair, heads the "Information Awareness Office" in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (the same agency which spawned stealth aircraft technology). Poindexter is on the verge of getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private act of every American. He is determined to break down the wall between commercial snooping and secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral dismisses such necessary differentiation as bureaucratic "stovepiping." And he has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans.
Even Neo-conservative NY Times editorialist William Safire has negative things to say about this program: "Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend ? all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."
To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.
Article 13.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Violation: There are 2 major violations of Article 13, section 1: the creation of no-fly lists by several government agencies and a new Michigan policy that allows for random traffic stops and searches. According to a spokesperson for the new Transportation Security Administration, the government has a list of about 1,000 people who are deemed "threats to aviation" and not allowed on airplanes under any circumstances, and acknowledged the fact that another list exists that subjects political activists to strict scrutiny but still allows them to fly. Meanwhile, airport security personnel, citing lists that are provided by the agency and that appear to be on airline ticketing and check-in computers, seem to be netting mostly priests, elderly nuns, Green Party campaign operatives, left-wing journalists, right-wing activists and people affiliated with Arab or Arab-American groups. See www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=02/11/15/7467685 for more information.
In Michigan, officials will begin to use an obscure but long-standing federal law that allows the government to conduct searches and surveillance within 25 miles of any international border. Ostensibly, federal agents will begin randomly stopping traffic, looking for illegal immigrants, terrorists and drug or weapon smugglers. But how soon before they will they be looking for draft dodgers, activists, and such? Cars will be stopped at unannounced, rotating checkpoints within Michigan, including metro Detroit. U.S. Border Patrol agents at the checkpoints will ask passengers their citizenship and will have leeway to ask a host of follow-up questions. The effort is part of President George W. Bush's attempt to increase security along the northern border, said Immigration and Naturalization spokeswoman Karen Kraushaar. But civil liberties groups have raised serious concerns: "We believe it's going to be very hard for them to do this without violating people's civil rights, or profiling people based on their ethnicity or accent," said Kary Moss, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan.
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Violation: See explanation of article 12.
Article 20.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Violation: See explanation of article 9.
Article 28.
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized. Violation: See explanation of article 12.
Article 2.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Violation: As reported in the NY Times, the Bush Administration has begun to monitor the activities of Iraqis inside the United States. According to senior government officials, the intelligence program involves tracking thousands of Iraqi citizens and Iraqi-Americans with dual citizenship who attend American universities or work at private U.S. companies. Some of the targets of the operation are being electronically monitored under the authority of national security warrants and efforts are underway to recruit others as informants. If American forces invade Iraq, the effort would be intensified through detentions and arrests of Iraqis or Iraqi sympathizers.
A further violation of Article 2 can be seen in INS practices post 9-11, where international students have to meet much stricter requirements and are scrutinized to a much higher degree. This includes the FBI and INS creating a database of all such students, specifically tracking them, and even limiting what classes they are allowed to take.
In addition, the Justice Department has announced yesterday that it will require thousands of students, workers and other men from five Muslim countries who are temporarily residing in the United States to be fingerprinted and photographed, the latest step in its program to register visitors from countries linked to terrorism. Article 3.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Violation: The INS, in conjunction with the FBI, has been responsible for thousands of detentions since September 11, all without hearings or due process. Some people have even been detained for protesting the detentions of family members. Most of these detentions have been done in secret, without people's names being released, and in many cases, with detainees being moved far away from their families and base of support (ie. one detainee from the Northeast, after some investigation into his case, was moved to another prison somewhere in the Southwest).
Article 5.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Violation: In complete violation of the Geneva Convention, the United States government is illegally holding prisoners-of-war from Afghanistan in legal limbo in Guatanomo Bay in Cuba. Images of blindfolded prisoners kneeling shackled by wire cages at Guatanomo Bay have ignited international controversy. The use of restraints, covered goggles, ear muffs and face masks has raised fears that the US is mistreating suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners. The prisoners are being detained in temporary open-sided wire cells. Sized 1.8m by 2.4m, these have been described as 'kennels' and 'cages' by critics and dubbed 'a scandal' by a Human Rights Watch spokesman. The prisoners are not shackled when they are inside their cells, but when they are moved around the camp, for showers or exercise, they are restrained at a 'level appropriate for the person' - which may include hand and leg shackles.
Article 6.
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Violation: See explanation of violations of Article 2.
Article 8.
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
Violation: See explanation of Article 5.
Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Violation: See explanation of Article 3.
A further violation of this article was exemplified by the actions of the Washington, DC Metro Police on September 27. Several hundred people were blocked in Pershing Park for more than two hours by D.C. police and U.S. Park Police and then arrested. Some said they spent several hours on a bus waiting for processing after their arrest and an additional 12 hours handcuffed in a Southwest police facility. District police, the city and federal authorities obviously violated the constitutional rights of these people, who, while in police custody, were held in abusive conditions. For example, some of those arrested reported being shackled wrist to ankle for over 12 hours. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a lawyer with the Partnership for Civil Justice, a District-based law firm that has filed a suit in relation to these illegal arrests, has said, "The government illegally trapped, detained and arrested a lawful assembly of people, as well as others who had come out to hear the messages of the protests." She went on to say that the purpose of the arrests was to take protesters off the streets, and to gain as much information on activists by way of mugshots, fingerprinting, and gathering of personal information.
Article 10.
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Violation: Post-September 11th, President George W. Bush declared that the United States is now immersed in such an "extraordinary emergency" that secret military tribunals will try various foreign terrorist suspects who are arrested either in this country or abroad. The president himself will decide who is so tried and who isn't, and the rules of procedure, including standards required for conviction, will be established by the Secretary of Defense. Some of the offenses for which defendants will be tried will be capital, and there will be no judicial review. The president's decision was defended by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who told the press, "Foreign terrorists who commit war crimes against the United States, in my judgment, are not entitled to and do not deserve the protections of the American Constitution, particularly when there could be very serious and important reasons related to not bringing them back to the United States for justice." This presupposes that those being tried by the tribunals are guilty - an assumption completely opposite of our laws which have always assumed that defendants are innocent until proved guilty. It also misses one of the main purposes of constitutional protections, which is not merely to protect the rights of the individual but also to restrain the government itself.
Article 11.
(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
Violation: See explanation of article 10.
Further, the way the mass media is run today, and considering who owns it (corporations), there is no presumption of innocence. As someone posted on Infoshop.org, "Our mass media is basically an outlet to push whatever programs, wars, etc. the top politicians in the US government wants. They focus on those intensely, barely covering any other news at all. To keep an illusion of them being somehow "free" they occassionally have people who barely disagree on [the news], and who disagree in weak ways..."
Article 12.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Violation: With the passage of the Patriot Act, it was made much easier for law enforcement officials to spy on us. The police now have the power to perform "No Knowledge" searches on people's property. This means that law enforcement does not need to inform you that they have a warrant, nor do you need to be present for them to search your property. Law enforcement officials can search when you are not present, and are not obligated to tell you that they did so. The police are also now able to perform "No Knock" searches - police no longer have to knock and alert you that they possess a warrant. Instead, they can just kick down your door and enter the premises. In addition, warrants are no longer needed for wire-taps.
A much scarier violation of this article is the creation of the Total Information Awareness program and database. John Poindexter, yes the same person convicted in 1990 of five felony counts of lying to Congress, destroying official documents and obstructing congressional inquiries into the Iran-contra affair, heads the "Information Awareness Office" in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (the same agency which spawned stealth aircraft technology). Poindexter is on the verge of getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private act of every American. He is determined to break down the wall between commercial snooping and secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral dismisses such necessary differentiation as bureaucratic "stovepiping." And he has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans.
Even Neo-conservative NY Times editorialist William Safire has negative things to say about this program: "Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend ? all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."
To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.
Article 13.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Violation: There are 2 major violations of Article 13, section 1: the creation of no-fly lists by several government agencies and a new Michigan policy that allows for random traffic stops and searches. According to a spokesperson for the new Transportation Security Administration, the government has a list of about 1,000 people who are deemed "threats to aviation" and not allowed on airplanes under any circumstances, and acknowledged the fact that another list exists that subjects political activists to strict scrutiny but still allows them to fly. Meanwhile, airport security personnel, citing lists that are provided by the agency and that appear to be on airline ticketing and check-in computers, seem to be netting mostly priests, elderly nuns, Green Party campaign operatives, left-wing journalists, right-wing activists and people affiliated with Arab or Arab-American groups. See www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=02/11/15/7467685 for more information.
In Michigan, officials will begin to use an obscure but long-standing federal law that allows the government to conduct searches and surveillance within 25 miles of any international border. Ostensibly, federal agents will begin randomly stopping traffic, looking for illegal immigrants, terrorists and drug or weapon smugglers. But how soon before they will they be looking for draft dodgers, activists, and such? Cars will be stopped at unannounced, rotating checkpoints within Michigan, including metro Detroit. U.S. Border Patrol agents at the checkpoints will ask passengers their citizenship and will have leeway to ask a host of follow-up questions. The effort is part of President George W. Bush's attempt to increase security along the northern border, said Immigration and Naturalization spokeswoman Karen Kraushaar. But civil liberties groups have raised serious concerns: "We believe it's going to be very hard for them to do this without violating people's civil rights, or profiling people based on their ethnicity or accent," said Kary Moss, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan.
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Violation: See explanation of article 12.
Article 20.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Violation: See explanation of article 9.
Article 28.
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized. Violation: See explanation of article 12.