AMNESTY TO TAKE ON AMERICA

Rights group to cite police system abuses

Amnesty International, in its first campaign directed at any Western
nation, intends to publish a harsh report on the United States on
Tuesday, saying U.S. police forces and criminal and legal systems have
"a persistent and widespread pattern of human rights
violations."

Amnesty International, the 37-year-old human rights organization based
in London, plans to make its report the focus of a yearlong effort in
more than 100 countries and in international bodies like the United
Nations to protest what it calls a U.S. failure "to deliver the
fundamental promise of rights for all."

The report is part of a growing effort among human rights
organizations to seek "balance" in reporting by looking at
industrialized as well as developing nations. The Clinton
administration has encouraged that trend more than its predecessors,
welcoming monitors from the U.N. Human Rights Commission in the face
of sharp criticism from some members of Congress.

But U.S. officials and U.S human rights groups that are also often
critical have had mixed reactions to some international reports,
describing some as selective or lacking in nuance and context and
often deliberately excluding background information on civil rights
protections in the United States.

The new Amnesty report is bound to be among the most controversial of
the recent surveys. Officials in New York, which figures prominently,
and in Washington, D.C., declined to comment because they had not seen
the report.

The 150-page report pulls together widely reported cases of abuses
around the United States and incorporates the work of U.S. advocacy
groups and Amnesty investigations. Without responses from U.S.
officials, it concludes with this statement:

"Across the country thousands of people are subjected to sustained and
deliberate brutality at the hands of police officers. Cruel, degrading
and sometimes life-threatening methods of constraint continue to be a
feature of the U.S. criminal justice system."

The report also condemns what it sees as a general failure to punish
offending officials. It criticizes the treatment of people who seek
asylum by U.S. immigration authorities and calls, as Amnesty has done
in the past, for the end of the death penalty, which the report says
is "often enacted in vengeance, applied in an arbitrary manner,
subject to bias because of the defendant's race or economic status, or
driven by the political ambitions of those who oppose it."

Pierre Sane, a development expert from Senegal who has been secretary
general of Amnesty International for six years, said in an interview
that the United States was chosen as the first Western target because
human rights conditions were deteriorating.

"We felt it was ironic that the most powerful country in the world
uses international human rights laws to criticize others," Sane said,
"but does not apply the same standards at home."

Sane does not deny that the report, some of it in strong, often
polemical language, seems to hold government officials more
responsible for violations than the individuals who exceed their
authority in committing abuses.

"Responsibility to uphold human rights lays with the federal
government, lays with the Congress, lays with authorities in the
different states," he said. "I think that what our research has found
is a generalized failure of the systems of monitoring, of
accountability for the police, for the prison guards, for immigration

officials."

Sane said the purpose of the Amnesty campaign against the United
States was "to raise awareness of the need to take action."

"I think in terms of the severity of what is happening in the U.S.,
more or less people are aware," Sane said. "They are aware that in the
States police can be brutal. They're aware that prisons are not the
best place to be in. But what we are concerned with is the lack of
action and the complacency."

The report also criticizes the United States for failing to sign
international rights conventions, among them the Convention on the
Rights of the Child.

Checked-by: Rich O'Grady