Third Way: The United States’ Violations of Human Rights
Alison Wright
In 1994, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) estimated that anti-personnel land mines killed or injured roughly 2,000 people per month. This statistic led the ICRC and several other NGOs in the United Nations to lead a campaign against the use of anti-personnel land mines, so named because the mines are activated by any person who steps on them and therefore do not discriminate between enemy, ally, civilian, or child. The campaign against anti-personnel land mines succeeded, leading to the Convention on the Prohibition of Anti-Personnel Mines in 1997, more widely known as the Ottawa Convention, and eventually the Mine Ban Treaty. 164 countries signed onto the treaty and ended their use of these land mines as well as working to safely destroy the ones they already had. Although more than three-quarters of the world’s countries – and all of the US’s NATO allies – are members of the treaty, the United States is not one of them. Ironically, the other countries that did not sign include the countries that the United States has always criticized for their human rights record, such as China, North Korea, and Iran.
US Policy of Landmines
While Clinton, the president of the US during the time of the Ottawa Convention, unfortunately did not sign onto the treaty, he did still call for the eventual elimination of these landmines. During Obama’s presidency in 2014, he announced a new policy that would further Clinton’s hope. Under his policy the US would no longer use anti-personnel landmines (outside of the Korean Peninsula in which landmines have been in place since the Korean War) and would start to destroy all their current stockpiles of the landmines. Unfortunately, Trump reversed this order in 2020. Trump’s policy allows for the US to develop and use anti-personnel landmines anywhere in the world if they are “non-persistent”, which means that they are equipped with self-destruct or self-deactivation features. Even with these features, anti-personnel landmines are still incredibly dangerous to civilians before their self-destruction and the features are also known to fail at times.
Biden vowed on the campaign trail to reverse Trump’s policy and yet, three months into his term, the Department of Defense reported that the policy would be kept in place for the time being, leading to criticism from lobbying groups. Less than one week later, Biden’s administration stated that they would indeed roll back the policy and would work on phasing out the use and production of land mines. Biden has yet to announce whether he would return to Obama’s 2014 policy or create a new one. This prompted Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative Jim McGovern to write a letter to Biden, signed by 19 other Congresspeople from both parties, urging him to sign onto the Mine Ban Treaty. As the US remains one of the few countries who are not members of the treaty, the bipartisan congressional letter demonstrates that it is past time for the United States to join the treaty and ban the use of land mines outright.
Questionable American Actions
Anti-personnel landmines are not the only globally prohibited weapon that the United States has continued to use. International humanitarian law, which aims to protect civilians from the damage of wars, “forbids the use of weapons that are indiscriminate in nature”. While this includes weapons like anti-personnel landmines that countries typically use against one another, it also includes certain weapons that governments would be likely to use against their own citizens. One example of this is tear gas, which was classified as a chemical weapon in the 1925 Geneva Protocol and thus its use is globally prohibited, as it also an indiscriminate weapon. Yet the United States has continued to use tear gas against its own people, a fact which became much more widely known during the Black Lives Matter protests that sounded through the nation in the summer of 2020. There were many reports of police officers who were quick to use tear gas as a way to disperse protestors, even though it can cause miscarriages, chemical burns, blindness, and death. Why would the United States authorize the use of a chemical weapon that was deemed too dangerous to use by international law?
Besides globally-prohibited weapons in use in the United States, the country has also been accused of breaking international war-crime laws on multiple occasions. One instance of this was in 2018, after then-President Trump ordered an airstrike on Syria, with the help of France and Britain, in response to an alleged chemical attack by the Syrian government on its citizens. The UN Security Council held a meeting directly after the attacks to discuss the actions of the US, France, and Britain, and the delegates’ responses were rather mixed. While all the delegates seemed to agree that Syria was violating human rights laws if they were indeed using chemical weapons against their own citizens, several countries believed that the US airstrike also violated international law. The UN is based in the ideals of multilateralism to prevent any one country from acting in a war-like manner of their own accord, which is exactly what the United States did. The Bolivian delegate stated that the United States broke the UN Charter by acting unilaterally, as well as the Geneva Convention, which states that “the right of the parties to an armed conflict… is not unlimited”.
International Humanitarian Law
The above instances – refusing to sign the Mine Ban Treaty, the use of chemical weapons against our own people, and the unilateral airstrikes on Syria – demonstrate the willingness of the United States to ignore international law as well as commit blatant violations of human rights. International humanitarian law exists to protect those who are not participating in armed conflict from being collateral damage. The United States has broken this on multiple occasions – or has simply refused to participate in it, such as its refusal to join the Mine Ban Treaty. Congress is torn on the US actions that might violate human rights. Despite bipartisan support for ending the use of anti-personnel land mines, the majority of Republicans believe Trump was right to fire on Syria while Democrats felt the opposite.
The first step the United States can take to build a good relationship with humanitarian laws would be to join the Mine Ban Treaty. The US should also take a serious look at the weapons that it authorizes to use against its own people that are deemed illegally globally, such as tear gas. As the United States continuously seems to proclaim itself as the world’s savior, it would benefit from acting in ways that do not harm innocent bystanders and civilians from hostile conflicts.
