The Obama administration has, once again, complained to the United Nations about alleged American human rights violations–and boasted about liberal policies like Obamacare as the solution.
The State Department report, released Monday as part of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) at the UN Human Rights Council, reads less like an accounting of human rights issues and more like the platform of the Democratic Party–and invites the world to judge America harshly.
The so-called “human rights” problems cited in the report include:
- Police brutality, including the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri
- Discrimination against Muslims who want to build or expand mosques
- Voter identification laws in Texas and elsewhere
- Predatory lending in home mortgages
- Suspension of black children in schools
- Women earning “78 cents on the dollar” (a false statistic)
In addition, the report boasts of progress in the following areas:
- Promoting same-sex marriage
- Fighting discrimination against transgender children in school
- Executive action on illegal immigration
- Helping illegal alien children who cross the border
- Protecting privacy rights against government surveillance
- Trying to close the Guantánamo Bay prison for terror detainees
- Revoking “torture” memos for interrogating terrorists
- Passing Obamacare
- Expanding food stamps
- Regulating “carbon pollution” to fight climate change
The apologetic, left-liberal report echoes one filed by the Obama administration five years ago, during which the State Department proudly told the Human Rights Council that the administration opposed Arizona’s new immigration law, among other alleged American misdeeds.
Critics of the UN note that “the UPR has become a place where abusers are applauded and democracies are heavily criticized,” and “Iran, Libya, China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia” are treated lightly.
Al-Jazeera America reported that the U.S. was subjected to scathing criticism from a variety of dictatorships after filing its report, including Chad, Pakistan, Russia, and China.
Iran, for example, complained about racial discrimination in the United States, among other criticisms, calling on the U.S. to “protect the rights of African-Americans against police brutality.” (The Iranian regime brutally represses its own population, and used police and paramilitaries to crush a pro-democracy protest in 2009.)
The Qatar-owned network piled on with a misleading headline: “US cited for police violence, racism in scathing UN review on human rights.”
The story implied that it was the UN that had targeted the United States, rather than the Obama administration targeting America–a rather telling conflation of America’s enemies with the Obama administration itself.
A representative of the Obama administration offered meekly: “The tragic deaths of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Michael Brown in Missouri, Eric Garner in New York, Tamir Rice in Ohio and Walter Scott in South Carolina have renewed a long-standing and critical national debate about the even-handed administration of justice.
“These events challenge us to do better and to work harder for progress–through both dialogue and action.”
The Obama administration also boasted to the UN about challenging “racially discriminatory voting laws in North Carolina and Texas,” though many UN member states have laws requiring voter photo identification, and similar laws have been upheld in the recent past by the U.S. Supreme Court as constitutional and non-discriminatory.
This post has been updated to include quotes from the Iranian and U.S. representatives.