Facts on U.S. breaching international rules

Source: Xinhua | 2021-04-20 18:39:24 | Editor: huaxia

BEIJING, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Indulging in the superiority as the world's superpower, the United States habitually claims itself as the "defender of international law", blames unscrupulously other countries and slaps arbitrary sanctions on them under the pretext of safeguarding international rules.

However, the United States in fact makes its selfish political gains first and puts its national law above international laws. The self-righteous country willfully breaks treaties and withdraws from international organizations, changing like a weathercock.

Under the pretense of democracy and human rights, Washington constantly interferes in other countries' internal affairs, blatantly wages wars to encroach upon other countries' sovereignty, flagrantly undermines international order, and poses a grave threat to international security.

What the U.S. has done has severely violated international rules including the United Nations (UN) Charter. The U.S. attempt to press other countries to "abide by rules" is in fact nothing but force them to yield to a unipolar world order dominated by the United States.

1.INTERFERENCE IN OTHER COUNTRIES' INTERNAL AFFAIRS, VIOLATING OTHER COUNTRIES' SOVEREIGNTY

◆ The principle of non-interference in other countries' internal affairs is an important principle of the UN Charter and the basic norm governing international relations. However, the U.S. government, under the guise of so-called democracy and human rights, has long interfered in China's internal affairs on issues related to ideology, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet.

Through arm sales to and official contacts with Taiwan, and with statements or acts that connive at "Taiwan independence", the U.S. government has been creating obstacles to the reunification of the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. After China resumed exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong, the United States colluded with a fraction of opposition forces in Hong Kong and incited social unrest there. It also wantonly smeared China's policy of governance in Xinjiang, as well as the central government's counter-terrorism and de-extremism efforts in the region, viciously slandered Xinjiang's human rights situation, and imposed unilateral sanctions on related Chinese individuals and entities.

Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff of former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, personally admitted that the so-called Xinjiang Uygur issue is nothing but a strategic plot of the United States to destabilize and contain China from the inside.

◆ Being a co-sponsor of the 1267 counter-terrorism committee of the UN Security Council to list the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as a terrorist organization, the U.S. flip-flopped on the UN designation in November 2020 by removing the ETIM from its list of terrorist organizations, and brazenly whitewashed the terror group. For years, the United States has been providing shelter to forces like the so-called "pro-democracy movement," the ETIM and Falun Gong, which have conspired to destabilize China. U.S. politicians also met with people from those forces for multiple times as a gesture of endorsement, which exposed their real purpose of meddling with China's internal affairs in the name of "democracy and freedom."

◆ It is an international consensus that the principle of state sovereignty applies to cyberspace. But the United States, with its advantage in information technology and cyber military power, has time and again intruded and attacked other countries' cyber systems, which violated their sovereignty. In June 2013, the PRISM scandal systematically revealed the fact that the United States had long been hacking into other countries' network systems, and conducting massive network surveillance and espionage.

◆ The United States and other Western countries have been preaching and peddling the so-called system of freedom and democracy by promoting "color revolutions" across the world. The Arab Spring backed and engineered by the U.S. has created continuous turmoil in many countries in West Asia and North Africa. The United States has also long been carrying out intelligence infiltration and subversive activities in Venezuela, Panama and many Middle East countries, and has assisted opposition forces in those countries to plot coups, which seriously interfered in other countries' internal affairs.

◆ The United States is a signatory to international conventions such as the Hague Evidence Convention (also known as the Convention on the Taking of Evidence Abroad in Civil or Commercial Matters), the United Nations Convention Against Corruption and the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime. It has also ratified 69 criminal judicial assistance treaties with foreign countries. However, under the pretext of avoiding low efficiency and excessive restrictions in judicial assistance procedures, the United States established a subpoena ad testificandum system through domestic legislation and judicial precedents to conduct frequent extraterritorial evidence collections, which has been exercised via the Patriot Act Subpoenas and the Bank of Nova Scotia Subpoenas, and seriously undermined the judicial sovereignty and legal dignity of other countries.

◆ Since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, there have been a number of abusive lawsuits in the United States seeking compensation from the Chinese government for the COVID-19 impact. According to international law experts, the U.S. courts' acceptance of these lawsuits against the Chinese government violated the principle of sovereign equality of states enshrined in the UN Charter and the principle of sovereign immunity in international law, and gravely infringed on China's national sovereignty and dignity.

2.VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL RULES, THREATENING PEACE AND SECURITY

◆ The United States has long disregarded the fundamental principle of international law that prohibits the unlawful use of force or threat to use force, and has brazenly launched wars against other sovereign states.

In 2003, the United States used a bottle of white laundry detergent as the alleged evidence of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction and launched an attack on the country without UN authorization, which caused hundreds of thousands of casualties and displaced more than 1 million people.

In 2018, some countries, including the United States, Britain and France, launched airstrikes on Syria, causing casualties and displacement to tens of thousands of innocent civilians. A 2019 UN report concluded that the United States and the Western coalition forces might not have directed their attack targets at a specific military objective or failed to do so with the necessary precaution, which thus may constitute war crimes.

The evidence of the so-called use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government turned out to be a staged video directed by the White Helmets, an organization funded by the U.S. and British intelligence agencies.

In January 2020, the U.S. forces conducted the targeted killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani, in violation of the UN Charter and the Geneva Convention's provisions on the use of military force.

◆ The United States has been upgrading its nuclear arsenal, lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, using the so-called "trilateral negotiations" as a pretext to evade its special responsibility for nuclear disarmament, and even entertain the thought of resuming nuclear tests.

The United States has deployed anti-missile systems in the Asia-Pacific region and Central and Eastern Europe, and is seeking to deploy land-based intermediate missile systems in the Asia-Pacific and European regions in an attempt to strengthen its military presence and establish absolute superiority.

◆ The United States has stood alone in opposing negotiations on a verification protocol of the Biological Weapons Convention and impeded international efforts to verify the biological activities in member countries and has thus become a "stumbling block" to the process of biological arms control.

The United States has secretly set up biological laboratories in many places around the world and engaged in biological militarization. The link between the U.S. military laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and the spread of the novel coronavirus remains suspicious. As the only country with stockpiles of chemical weapons in the world, the United States has repeatedly postponed destroying its chemical weapons and dragged its feet toward fulfilling its obligations, making itself the biggest obstacle to achieving "a world free of chemical weapons."

◆ By establishing the U.S. Space Force and the Space Command, the United States has been accelerating space weapons tests and military exercises, threatening space security and contradicting the principle of peaceful use of outer space.

In 2015, the country enacted a law allowing the commercial exploration and exploitation of space resources on celestial bodies such as the moon, violating the 1967 Outer Space Treaty which stipulates that "outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."

◆ The South China Sea is more than 8,300 miles away from the continental United States, yet the U.S. side has established multiple military bases with offensive weapons and equipment deployed around the area. It has frequently sent aircraft carriers and strategic bombers to the South China Sea and deployed a large number of military aircraft and warships there on a regular basis, and even impersonated civil aircraft by using other countries' transponder codes, which violates international aviation rules, disrupts the aviation order and safety in relevant airspace, and threatens the national security of countries in the region.

◆ On June 27, 1986, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the United States' actions of financing and training the Nicaraguan opposition, and planting offensive weapons in the relevant waters of Nicaragua violated the sovereignty of Nicaragua and the principle banning unlawful use of force or military threats.

3.UNILATERAL BULLYING & SANCTIONS IN PURSUIT OF SUPREME DOMINATION

◆ According to data published by U.S. legal firm Gibson Dunn, under former President Donald Trump's administration, the United States took more than 3,900 distinct sanctions actions, a record frequency of about 3 times a day.

◆ Based on its own Trade Act of 1974, the United States abandoned the basic norms of international exchanges, such as mutual respect and equal consultation, practiced unilateralism, protectionism and economic hegemony, and launched the Section 301 Investigation against China. In July and August 2018, the United States separately imposed additional tariffs of 25 percent on Chinese imports worth 50 billion U.S. dollars, and the tariff measures have been escalated since then. On Sept. 24, 2018, the United States started imposing an additional 10-percent tariff on 200 billion dollars worth of Chinese products, which seriously violates the basic principles and spirit of the World Trade Organization.

◆ Contrary to the principles of market competition and international trade and economic rules it has always touted, the United States has generalized the concept of national security and abused its national power and went all out to suppress specific Chinese companies. To date, it has listed 382 Chinese companies and institutions on its Entity List and 44 Chinese companies as "Communist Chinese military enterprises." It published a "Military End User List" that includes 73 Chinese companies and enacted the so-called "Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act" with provisions that clearly discriminate against Chinese companies.

◆ To suppress Huawei, the United States abused the criminal justice process and the U.S.-Canada extradition treaty to hold Huawei's Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou hostage on trumped-up charges as a means to pressure China.

◆ The United States has imposed several rounds of sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 project, which links Russia with Germany, in the past few years because the United States believes the project will impact the U.S. gas industry and its geopolitical interests in the Eurasian region. The United States has also abused its "long-arm jurisdiction" to target foreign companies such as Deutsche Bank and France's Alstom, posing a serious threat to the economic sovereignty of other countries.

◆ The United States has pursued a strategy of "maximum pressure" on Iran and prevented the UN Security Council from lifting the conventional arms embargo and travel ban on Iran on time in accordance with Resolution 2231 on the Iranian nuclear issue. In 2020, the United States pushed for the extension of the arms embargo on Iran in the UN Security Council, called for the activation of the "snapback" mechanism, and unilaterally announced the reinstatement of sanctions against Iran. The U.S. moves have failed due to the opposition of the vast majority of the UN Security Council members.

◆ The United States announced unilateral sanctions against officials of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in September 2020 because the ICC approved and authorized the chief prosecutor to launch investigations into war crimes and crimes against humanity by Taliban, Afghan security forces, and U.S. military and intelligence personnel in Afghanistan. After U.S. President Joe Biden took office, the United States withdrew the relevant sanctions but still refused to face its own problems.

4.PUTTING AMERICA FIRST AND RENEGING ON COMMITMENTS AND OBLIGATIONS

◆ For a period of time, the U.S. government repeatedly threatened to withdraw from a series of treaties and international organizations. It violated the spirit of contract and international morality by withdrawing from organizations and breaking contracts at will, and treating international organizations as amusement parks where it can come and go whenever it wants.

◆ The United States has long owed huge amounts of money in its UN dues and peacekeeping contributions. According to the statistics of the UN Secretariat, as of the beginning of April, the United States still owed 1.237 billion dollars in UN dues and 1.646 billion dollars to the UN peacekeeping budget, which respectively account for 51 percent and 61 percent of the total arrears owed by all member states.

◆ At the critical stage of the global fight against COVID-19, the United States, in order to find a "scapegoat" for its own incompetent handling of the epidemic, publicly intensified its conflict with the World Health Organization (WHO), repeatedly threatening to cut its funding, and announcing in July 2020 that it would officially withdraw from the WHO in July 2021. After taking office, the Biden administration announced that it would stop the exit process.

◆ In June 2018, the United States announced its withdrawal from the UN Human Rights Council, citing the council's "bias" against Israel and its inability to effectively protect human rights. In February 2021, the United States announced that it would run for the membership of the council in 2022-2024, and said that countries with poor human rights records should not become members of the council.

◆ In April 2017, the Trump administration announced a unilateral "cut-off" of funding to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) on the grounds that the organization "supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization." After taking office, the Biden administration restored funding to the UNFPA in a high-profile manner.

◆ The United States is a founding member of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, but announced its withdrawal from the organization twice in 1984 and 2017 during the organization's more than 70 years of development.

◆ In 2020, despite objection from its allies, the United States announced that it initiated the procedure of exiting from the Open Skies Treaty from May 22.

◆ In 2019, the United States announced its withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty for the sake of developing advanced weapons without constraints.

◆ In order to maintain its own quota dominance in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United States forcibly blocked the IMF from completing the 15th general review of quotas before the 2019 annual meeting in accordance with the consensus of G20 leaders, and refused to transfer more quotas to emerging markets and developing countries, leading to a fruitless end of the relevant reform process.

◆ In October 2018, in response to Palestine taking the United States to the International Court of Justice over the relocation of the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, the United States announced its withdrawal from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations Concerning the Compulsory Settlement of Disputes, which is related to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice.

◆ In May 2018, the United States insisted on announcing its withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action endorsed by the UN Security Council, despite the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency repeatedly confirmed Iran's fulfillment of its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal, and the United States had no evidence to prove that Iran had violated the agreement.

◆ In December 2017, the U.S. Mission to the United Nations announced that it would not participate in the Global Compact on Migration negotiation process, claiming that U.S. "decisions on immigration policies must always be made by Americans and Americans alone." In December 2018, the United States voted against the Global Compact on Migration at the 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly.

◆ Out of its self-interest, the United States has been blocking the selection of members for the WTO's Appellate Body since August 2017, forcing the body into paralysis in December 2019. As the body has not yet resumed normal operation, the authority and effectiveness of the multilateral trading system are seriously undermined.

◆ In June 2017, the United States stated that it would withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change in order to fulfill its "solemn duty to protect America and its citizens." Two months after its formal withdrawal in November 2020, the United States announced that it rejoined the Paris Agreement.

◆ After signing the Kyoto Protocol, the United States still allowed its own carbon emissions to grow rapidly, while at the same time, it frequently asked developing countries to increase their emission reductions. The United States even made the emission reduction obligations of developing countries a prerequisite for their accession to the Kyoto Protocol. The fact fully revealed the U.S. double standards of "treating itself leniently but being strict with others" in the multilateral arena.

◆ Although the United States has signed multilateral environmental treaties such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, the country has not ratified any of them so far.

The fact highlights the United States' unilateralist mentality of not wanting to be bound by international environmental treaties and evading its international responsibilities, and fully exposes the U.S. disregard for international environmental protection and its uncooperative attitude in the multilateral environmental field.

◆ In 2002, the United States announced that it withdrew its signature to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, citing disadvantages to its servicemen, diplomats and politicians.

◆ In 1982, the United States refused to sign the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in order to preserve its hegemonic interests in the oceans, and has not yet joined the convention.

5.INFAMOUS DOUBLE STANDARDS AND GROSS VIOLATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

◆ The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights puts the right to life at the top of human rights. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. government shows indifference to people's lives, despises science, slacks off on disease prevention and control, and prioritizes politics and capital interests in anti-pandemic decision-making, which has greatly threatened the lives of its citizens and seriously violated their rights to life and health.

As of April 18, the United States has reported more than 31.66 million COVID-19 cases, with more than 567,000 deaths, both ranking first in the world.

◆ To cover up their failure to contain the domestic spread of COVID-19, a few American politicians, who ignored the explicit opposition of the WHO and the international community to linking the virus with specific countries and regions, wantonly spread the rumors of "Chinese virus" and "Wuhan virus" on various occasions, and openly induced and incited racial discrimination and hatred, leading to frequent vicious attacks on Asian Americans.

These U.S. politicians' behavior has seriously violated the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. According to a report by the U.S.-based organization Stop AAPI Hate, at least 3,795 incidents of racial discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been reported from March 19, 2020 to Feb. 28, 2021. Surveys also showed that around 30 percent of Asian Americans have suffered racial discrimination during the pandemic.

◆ The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights noted that the increasingly unilateral use of economic sanctions almost without exception has a great impact on the enjoyment and exercise of people's rights. Therefore, to protect people's rights to life and health, no country should impose any embargo or take any similar measures at any time to restrict the provision of adequate medicines and medical equipment to another country.

During the pandemic, however, the United States imposed unilateral sanctions on Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria and other countries, making it difficult for these countries to obtain anti-pandemic medical materials in time, aggravating humanitarian crises in the relevant countries.

◆ International documents -- including the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, the American Convention on Human Rights, the General Comment No. 2 on the rights of migrant workers in an irregular situation and members of their families by the UN Committee on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers, and the General Comment No. 30 on the issue of discrimination against non-citizens by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination -- prohibit collective expulsion of migrants and confirm that immigrants have the right to emergency medical care.

Nonetheless, regardless of the risk of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States has continued to forcibly deport illegal immigrants and implemented a policy of family separation, infringing on the rights of immigrant children. According to the Los Angeles Times, since March 2020, the U.S. government has expelled at least 8,800 unaccompanied undocumented migrant children.

As a report submitted by the UN Independent Expert on human rights and international solidarity in accordance with the Resolution 35/3 of the UN Human Rights Council pointed out, the U.S. government forced immigrant children to separate from their asylum-seeking parents, a move that seriously endangers migrants' human rights such as rights to life, dignity and freedom.

In the 2020 fiscal year ending on Sept. 30, 21 people died in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the highest death toll since 2005. Doctors in the ICE custody were accused of performing unnecessary gynecological operations for dozens of female immigrants, and even removing their wombs without their consent, causing serious damage to the women's physical and mental health.

◆ The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights clearly stipulates that everyone has the inherent right to life, which cannot be deprived arbitrarily. In the United States, however, there are numerous examples of excessive use of force by law enforcement officers resulting in death.

In April 2020, African American George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in violent law enforcement, which set off a large-scale protest against racial discrimination and violent law enforcement by police across the United States, highlighting the great resentment of American people, especially African Americans, who have been suffering racial discrimination and extralegal killings for a long time.

◆ Although a signatory state to the UN Convention against Torture, the United States has a persistent problem of torture in its judicial system, as seen in the notorious prisoner abuse scandal of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.

John Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, once confessed that American troops inflicted murder rather than torture on some Iraqi prisoners of war. During the Iraq war, at least 100 people died in interrogations.

◆ In 2020, Trump pardoned four employees of U.S. private military company Blackwater, who committed massacres and war crimes in Iraq. The chairman of the Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries of the UN Human Rights Council pointed out that the pardon had an impact on international humanitarian law and human rights, and was an affront to justice as well as victims and their families.

Marta Hurtado, spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that "pardoning them contributes to impunity" and emboldens others to commit such crimes.