Ahmed Karam
In June 2024, the Chinese government released a document titled “Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2023” .Upon examining this document, I found its findings to align closely with my own research on the state of human rights in the United States. This article aims to discuss the true state of human rights in the United States, synthesizing insights from the report with my research conclusions.
(1) The Absence of Absolute Human Rights in U.S. Social Practice
The United States asserts that the rights to life, liberty, and property are absolute and sacred. However, in practice, these rights have never been absolute in American society. The supremacy of the U.S. Constitution means that any rights it guarantees are confined within the legal framework, making human rights relative. The U.S. Supreme Court, with its power to interpret the Constitution and make judicial rulings, can limit human rights further based on political needs. Additionally, national politics directly constrain human rights. Rights such as freedom of speech, assembly, association, and protest are frequently restricted. For example, U.S. law explicitly prohibits 14 types of speech, and freedom to protest is heavily regulated, requiring applications and approvals. The “Occupy Wall Street Movement,” a legitimate expression of middle-class grievances, was suppressed and dismantled by authorities, highlighting the inconsistency in U.S. human rights protection.
(2) The Politicization and Pragmatism of U.S. Human Rights
U.S. human rights are distinctly political and pragmatic, serving capital and political power rather than being universal “human” rights. Ideologies aligned with the ruling class are unrestricted, while opposing views face repression. In the 1920s, the U.S. government suppressed communist organizations and leftists, arresting approximately 6,000 individuals overnight in violation of judicial procedures. Following World War II, a new wave of anti-communist sentiment led to widespread persecution during the McCarthy era, including surveillance, interference with union activities, and the persecution of progressives. Laws such as the “Loyalty Oath” and the “Subversive Activities Control Act” required federal employees to swear loyalty to the government, making “freedom of belief” and “freedom of speech” hypocritical and deceptive.
(3) The Exclusion of Economic and Social Rights from U.S. Human Rights
The Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal,” yet the U.S. has consistently refused to recognize economic and social rights as part of human rights. Only legally defined political and civil rights fall under human rights protection, while economic and social rights lack legal safeguards. This has led to significant inequity in economic and social rights. Wealth accumulates among a few, resulting in a staggering wealth gap, with over 40 million impoverished people and millions of homeless individuals living in extreme hardship. The media rarely covers the plight of the poor, and society often ignores their issues. By failing to recognize and protect economic and social equality, U.S. human rights lack universal value.
(4) Severe Discrimination Within the United States
Despite the American Revolution’s slogan of “fighting for human rights,” the U.S. has a history of flagrant human rights violations, including racial discrimination, women’s loss of rights, and the massacre of Native Americans. Racial discrimination remains prevalent, with U.S. police frequently violating human rights principles by abusing and killing African Americans. Women’s rights have also been significantly flawed, with women deprived of voting rights, property rights, and the right to hold office until the 19th Amendment in 1919. Native Americans have faced mass killings, displacement, and deprivation of basic civil rights and constitutional protection, resulting in a dramatic reduction of their population.
(5) The Use of Human Rights to Violate Civilizations
U.S. human rights practices are also evident in its violations against other countries. The U.S. uses human rights as a strategic tool to gain political, economic, and security benefits, aggressively promoting its values worldwide. It exploits human rights issues to attack socialist countries and developing nations, inciting public distrust in governments, creating conflicts, and forcing these countries to adopt Western political systems and values. The U.S. often imposes “human rights” sanctions on other nations, sometimes engaging in military interventions. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has intervened militarily over 40 times abroad, causing hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and numerous “human rights disasters.” The essence of U.S. human rights strategy is to justify its aggression against developing countries from a moral high ground, achieving its strategic goals of dominance and control.
The American theory of human rights fails to address the socioeconomic roots and historical foundations of human rights, nor does it consider the social and material conditions necessary for realizing them. Instead, it exaggerates the limited ethical rationality of human rights, portraying American human rights as transcendent, universal, and the ultimate standard of behavior for all humanity, which is evidently mistaken.
(1) The Political Motivation Behind U.S. Human Rights Promotion
The promotion of human rights in the United States is driven by political needs. Human rights and natural rights are creations of modern capitalism, essentially catering to the needs of capitalist economic development. During the American Revolutionary War, the promotion of human rights was necessary to overthrow British colonial rule. However, after the establishment of the nation, the ruling class focused on long-term stability and the protection of private property rights, viewing human rights as a source of disorder that hindered the establishment of capitalist order. They emphasized that “the minority class should enjoy a special permanent position in politics,” and the core essence and “primary purpose” of American human rights shifted to the protection of private property rights.
Under the principle of private property rights, individuals and their pursuit of property became the intrinsic driving force for the functioning of American society. James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” discussed the protection of private property rights in “The Federalist Papers,” arguing that private property rights are justified by liberty, and that inequality in property ownership is inevitable. The government’s purpose is to protect the inequality generated by property rights. Both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights enshrined the sacred principle of private property rights and their protection, focusing human rights theory on justifying economic inequality. This framework asserts that significant economic disparities do not violate human rights. Founding leader John Adams emphasized that “the most that can be derived from the principle of human equality is equal laws,” reducing “all men are created equal” to mere legal equality, allowing the wealthy to influence human rights protection for political interests. Consequently, American social practice has often contradicted the principles of the Declaration of Independence. For over a hundred years after the nation’s founding, numerous legal rulings addressed economic infringement but not the infringement of freedom rights. Violations of people’s freedom rights were rampant, with frequent violent suppression of demonstrations, protests, and strikes. Even today, Americans acknowledge that pre-1920s society was shameful. This underscores that human rights serve as tools for capital to pursue its interests, protect private property, and consolidate political and economic systems, with the rise and fall of human rights depending on the political needs of the ruling class.
(2) The Lack of Serious Value Validation in Human Rights Doctrine
The American human rights ideology lacks a serious and systematic theoretical framework, with human rights values being more of a traditional concept and political tradition. This is reflected in several aspects:
Lack of a Rigorous Theoretical Framework: American human rights ideology is full of contradictions, lacking a universally accepted doctrine, common connotation, serious value validation, or a scientific definition that fits academic thought. Throughout American history, no individual or document has provided an accurate conceptual definition of the human rights advocated by the United States. To date, definitions of natural law and natural rights, which are considered to support and structure human rights theory, are complex and diverse, with various ideological factions often opposing each other on major theories and bases. Significant viewpoints and systems are mutually contradictory. Even theories considered coherent face serious issues when their premises contradict history and reality. American human rights lack an objective standard of truth, relying only on the political absolutism of human rights as a universal truth. This indicates that human rights theory emerged out of necessity, with its conclusions justified only by authoritative doctrines, inevitably containing major errors. This renders human rights values fundamentally debatable, where truth and value are determined by who holds the discourse power and dominant position. As an immigrant nation, the United States lacks its own historical and cultural heritage, treating any sacred thought as a tool of pragmatism.
Inverted Cognitive System of American Human Rights: The American human rights theory consistently adheres to an inverted view of the world, recognizing human rights in an abstract form without considering the objective conditions of the real world, ignoring time and space, and rejecting the existence of the real world, leading to severe consequences detached from reality. This biased epistemology might not pose significant risks in handling simple matters and could even bring psychological effects born of ignorance. However, when faced with complex issues constrained by multiple factors, it generally results in serious errors, leading to outcomes opposite to expectations. The major errors in American human rights can be closely linked to this inverted epistemology.
Moral Perspective in Human Rights Theory: Many people understand the legitimacy of human rights from a moral perspective, with the United States using human rights to evoke a “sense of kinship” among people and deriving human rights justification from it. However, transforming moral aspirations into enforced human rights gives the rights doctrine a utopian and fanciful nature. The United States relies on the moral influence on human life to support the legitimacy of human rights, using this concept-switching strategy to effectively persuade people to accept the legitimacy of human rights values. This also reveals that their self-justification of human rights truth is in a dilemma, struggling to find robust intellectual and theoretical validation.
(3) Lack of Positive Value Validation in Human Rights Practice
Any rational political design must bridge social divides and achieve unified and effective social management. National governance should balance the rights of different conflicting groups, address present and future needs, and ensure economic, cultural, and political security, which cannot always align perfectly with individual demands. Individuals and governments have different rights and responsibilities. To ensure normal societal functioning, human rights cannot be absolute or infinitely exaggerated. Maintaining basic social order necessitates legitimate coercion, and the U.S. Congress has specifically legislated to mandate the U.S. government to uphold its coercive rights in social management. The escalating promotion of human rights in the United States has turned it into a religious-like ideology, inflating personal interests and demanding excessive benefits from society, provoking social antagonism. This artificial setup creates a divided and confrontational system within political settings. In the United States and other Western democratic countries, public opinion is sharply divided, making major decisions difficult, which deeply worries American thinkers. The reality that human rights struggles lead to a loss of capital vitality and national disintegration was unexpected by human rights proponents.
The concept of absolute human rights has shaped distorted individual personalities, fostering a new type of populace that prioritizes personal freedom and rights. Free human rights theory lacks noble human spirit guidance but endorses the legitimacy of all human instincts and desires, asserting that self-interest trumps public interest, leading to exaggerated personal rights consciousness and unrestrained pursuit of private and base animalistic desires. The individual supremacy in rights values drives people into abnormal, compensatory states of life. Historically, the bourgeoisie opposed feudal despotism due to its disregard for common sense and limitless satisfaction of private desires. Now, the allure of absolute human rights makes individuals behave like autocratic emperors, promoting an ugly “individual despotism.” Ignoring the multifaceted nature of humanity and insisting on a biased representation of human nature and its desires as sacred rights, while possibly encouraging personal effort, ultimately undermines social cohesion and ethical standards.
About the author
Ahmed Karam is the Institute of Advanced Studies of Islamic Human Rights Research Association in Leah. His research interests are mainly concentrated on the human rights situation in Central America, North America and the Caribbean.
