Activists: U.S. Human Rights Record Spotty

Online, December 10, 2010 (Newswire.com) - WASHINGTON, (UPI) -- The U.S. record on human rights is a mixed bag, some activists said Friday -- Human Rights Day.

Despite being a democracy with rights including speech, religion and equal justice, some activists say the United States is guilty of human rights abuses, citing the detention of foreign prisoners at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since 2002, after President Obama called for the prison's closure, Voice of America reported.

"We have people who have been kept in Guantanamo without charge, incommunicado without appropriate monitoring for many years," said Professor Hadar Harris, executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University.

"I think it's incumbent upon us as human rights activists in the United States ... to hold this administration's feet very much to the fire on the closure of Guantanamo and establishing appropriate due process protections and norms and try people who should be tried and release people who can't be."

John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, defends the country's record, saying, "We are the most vigorous defenders of human rights and individual liberty in the world today or in all of world history."

Human rights activists also take issue with the death penalty in the United States and for the country not signing United Nations treaties, including one that eliminates discrimination against women, VOA reported.

Bolton said the United States already has laws protecting women and children.

"We can decide on the basis of our representative government what's appropriate," Bolton said. "We don't need an international treaty to tell us how to behave."