Asia-Pacific

China lashes out at US human rights record

352615_US-drone

China has released a report on human rights in the United States, slamming the country for its overseas drone attacks, state-sponsored spying and gun crime.

The report, which was issued by China’s State Council on Friday, said the US “concealed and avoided mentioning its own human rights problems,” such as a government-run intelligence program known as PRISM which it said “seriously infringes on human rights.”

The report also denounced Washington’s deadly drone strikes in countries such as Pakistan and added that they have caused “heavy civilian casualties.”

The US suffers from “rampant gun violence” while its agricultural sector employs a “large amount of child laborers,” Beijing said.

Last year, former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden leaked two top secret US government spying programs under which the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been eavesdropping on millions of American and European phone records and the Internet data from major Internet companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple and Microsoft.

Over the past several years, Washington has also been launching drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, saying the airstrikes target Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked militants in those countries. Yet, official figures show that most of the victims were civilians.

The country’s gun violence has also been under the spotlight, especially after a shooter killed 20 first-grade school children and six staff members using an assault rifle sold legally to his mother in a rampage at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012.

Since the deadly shooting in Newtown, the US media have reported more than 10,000 gun deaths in the country, according to an interactive project between slate.com and the anonymous creator of the Twitter feed @GunDeaths.

Beijing’s report comes a day after Washington issued a similar report criticizing China’s rights record.

Back to top button