Democracy in the USA Essay

Text of the US Constitution does not contain the word â€Å"democracy†. The U.S. Constitution was not a perfect document. Originally it contained provisions that are can be recognized as ambiguous. â€Å"The US Founding Fathers† did not create democracy in the modern sense of the word, but the republic. They did not fully trust the wisdom of the American people and their ability to make sound decisions. For many years America was considered to be an ideal democratic country, however in recent years the situation has drastically changed. Among the most important challenges facing America today is the growing social inequality, discrimination on racial, ethnic or religious grounds, practice of indefinite detention of prisoners without charges, judicial bias, operating outside the law in prison, use of torture, the impact of government agencies on the trials, weak penitentiary system, infringement of freedom of speech, Internet censorship, legalized corruption, limiting of citizens’ voting rights, acts of intolerance based on race and ethnicity, the violation of the rights of children, extraterritorial application of the U.S. law, leading to human rights violations in other countries, kidnapping, tracking dissidents, disproportionate use of force against peaceful demonstrators, application of the death penalty to minors and the mentally ill, etc. At the same time, the international legal obligations of the United States, continues to be reduced to participation in only three of the nine core human rights treaties, providing control mechanisms. The USA has not yet ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 1979, Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, 1990, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 2006 and the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, 2006. At the same time, Americans continue to wrongfully position themselves as an absolute authority and unquestioned leader in the field of democracy and human rights. They are engaged in mentoring, trying to teach others how to build their democracy and ensure human rights. Of ten they do this roughly, ignoring the basic international law principle of state sovereignty. Often their attempts to take care of human rights in other countries is bordering on outright interference in the internal affairs. At the same time, in the USA the situation with human rights remains very complicated. Fundamental political rights of Americans in today’s society, are not only exempt from the archaic elements, but they become even more vulnerable. Elections cause the most serious complaints. The U.S. president is still not elected by direct popular election, and by the Electoral College. Many rightly believe this system obsolete and undemocratic. With it, in particular, the voice of a resident of Delaware or North Dakota has mathematically much more weight than the voice of the voters in the larger states, such as California or New York. With this system, three times in the history of the U.S. the candidate with fewer votes than his opponent was elected the President (George W. Bush in 2000). And Gerald Ford has never been elected. At first, he was co-opted by the Republican National Committee instead of thieving Vice President Spiro Agnew, and then automatically took place of Richard Nixon who departed from his position because of the Watergate scandal. In general, the U.S. political system is based on the absolute monopoly of the two political parties which is far enough from the European-style multi-party democracy. More than 5.8 million Americans (2.5% of all potential voters) are deprived of voting rights because of a criminal record. This means that in general every 40th American citizen has no right to vote, among them every 13th African American (7.7% of total), and in some states, such as Kentucky, Virginia and Florida, more than 20 % of black Americans are deprived of voting rights. According to the Census Bureau, of the 75 million eligible citizens who did not use this right in the presidential election in 2008, 60 million were not able to do so due to lack of registration, which is associated with many cumbersome procedures. Currently only the states of Missouri, South Dakota and New Mexico, as well as the District of Columbia have laws that allow the access of international observers during the elections. In other regions, the issue of the activities of foreign observers is in the competence of local authorities. The implicit control over the population is being enhanced. The current U.S. law, in effect, allows the intelligence community to carry out a total censorship of all electronic communications of foreign and U.S. citizens without a warrant. It also requires telecommunications companies to assist the Government in gathering intelligence about foreign objects and to keep the information gathered in secret. Currently under consideration in Congress, the Cyber ​​Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act – CISPA, according to human rights activists, practically does not limit the possibility of the U.S. government to monitor web browsing of individuals. Freedom of speech is being limited. For attacks on journalists covering the action of the Occupy Wall Street movement, NGO â€Å"Reporters without Borders† in January 2012 lowered its rating of the U.S. in its annual global press freedom index for 27 items at once and put the U.S. on the 47th position (57th with the territories in which Washington exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction). According to an investigation of the Coalition of Independent Lawyers (Protest and Assembly Rights Project), only in New York from September 2011 to July 2012 at least 18 accredited reporters have been arrested. The site WikiLeaks was the subject of persecution by the U.S. administration in retaliation for the publication of the diplomatic dispatches. According to the latest Google report on the availability of services of the company, during the period from July to December 2011, the amount of requests for removal of content received by it from the U.S. government has increased by 103% compar ed to the previous reporting period. U.S. law enforcement agencies requested removal from YouTube video sharing hosting of 1.4 thousand videos that â€Å"contain insults.† 6.3 thousand queries required disclosure data of more than 12.2 thousand users of this company. 93% of these requirements were met. Quite specific topic is absolutely abhorrent practice of extrajudicial killings abroad. As part of the â€Å"war on terror† in Washington highly specific approaches have been developed, the application of which caused not only massive violation of many international legal norms, but also killing thousands of innocent people. Crimes against humanity committed by U.S. soldiers abroad often do not receive proper legal assessment of the national judicial system. Illegal abduction and detention of people remain in the arsenal of U.S. intelligence. In September 2006, President Bush acknowledged the existence of secret CIA prisons. As it became known later, in 2002-2003. secret services built about ten such detention facilities, including in foreign countries – Afghanistan, Iraq, Thailand, Morocco, Djibouti, Romania, Lithuania and Poland. In January 2012, a special prison at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay (Cuba) â€Å"celebrated† its 10th anniversary. U.S. President B arack Obama, despite his campaign promise, failed to close it because of counteraction of Congress. The practice of torture condemned by most countries of the world remains legalized in the United States. April 6, 2009 the Department of Justice published four memorandums, prepared in 2002-2005 by the lawyers of this agency. They thoroughly substantiated the legality of application of harsh interrogation techniques to prisoners of CIA prisons in terms of U.S. and international law. Along with other human rights violations in the United States numerous cases of police brutality have been recorded. Human rights activists note that the level of sexual crimes among American police is much higher than among the U.S. population as a whole. Mass practice in the United States have become systematic violations of human rights in detention. Business, which uses the prisoners’ labor flourishes in the USA. One in 10 prisoners in this country is contained in a commercial prison. The other fact demonstrating the low level of democracy in the USA are as follows: 1. In 33 U.S. states the death penalty is still permitted and applied; 2. Hundreds of thousands of children in the U.S. are abused which results in some cases (in 2010 – 1.6 thousand) to a lethal outcome; 3. In the U.S., social and economic rights are seriously disrupted. In the country there are 12.8 million unemployed, 40 million people do not have health insurance, 14.5% of families are experiencing food shortages; 4. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the USA has one of the highest levels of income inequality; 5. One of the most rightless segments of the population of America are migrants, who make up at least half of all those employed in the agricultural sector of the country; This brief review shows that the issue of human rights, facing all of humanity, is acutely relevant for the modern United States. All claims of the United States to be the moral leader in this area require a lot of preliminary work to clear own American â€Å"Augean stables.† Works Cited Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Study on Targeted Killings, Human Rights Council, 9-11, U.N. Doc. A/HRC/14/24/Add.6 (May 28, 2010).