US surveillance practices violate human rights: HRW

Electronic surveillance and intelligence gathering by the US National Security Agency violates fundamental civil rights, including the right to privacy, said a Human Rights Watch official on Wednesday.

“The mass communications surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden demonstrates a shocking disregard by the US for the privacy rights of both those inside the country and those abroad,” said Andrea Prasow, a senior national security counsel and advocate at the New York-based non-governmental organization.

The United States will appear before the United Nations Human Rights Committee on March 13 and 14, 2014, for a periodic review of its compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), a core international human rights treaty that the US ratified in 1992.

“The US review is the perfect time for the UN Human Rights Committee to make clear that mass communications surveillance, whether against a country’s own citizens or another country’s, violates basic rights,” Prasow said.

Documents released last year by Edward J. Snowden, a former NSA contractor, revealed that the agency systematically spies on phone calls and online activities of millions of people worldwide.

The HRW says the United States engages in many practices that fail to respect human rights. The US has failed to fully repudiate abusive counterterrorism policies developed after September 11, 2001 and to protect children by treating many as adults in the criminal justice system, according to the organization.

The HRW underlined that the US supports arbitrary and excessive sentencing and detention policies that do not take into account a person’s individual circumstances and ignores the consequences of discriminatory state and federal laws, policies, and practices.