– Kim Sung Il –
Researcher of Korean Association for Human Rights Studies
(April 18, 2023, mfa.gov.kp)
Time passes by and the course of history may change, but there is something that remains the same regardless of the turn of the era.
That is the poor human rights situation in the United States.
In the U.S., misanthropic murder and human trafficking become more rampant with each passing day. And as such, the fate and future of the children has also been thrown into abject misery.
The international community was deeply shocked at the two court trials held in the U.S. recently. One was of a 23-year-old woman in Michigan who brutally murdered her 3-year-old daughter by stabbing her 17 times and dumped the body in a garbage can and the other was of a 29-year-old woman in Texas who beat her 4-month-old daughter to death.
Here’s another data which attests to the miserable fates of U.S. children.
During a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in late March, a Republican Senator deplored that more than 85,000 Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) released into the U.S. interior from Department of Homeland Security (DHS) custody have been lost in the system and are being labour trafficked. The Head of DHS also admitted that many of the lost tens of thousands of UACs released into the U.S. over the last two years are being trafficked in labour markets.
This shows that children in the U.S. are only seen as mere tools of labour and means for making money.
There is an important reason why the U.S. has not yet ratified the “Convention on the Rights of the Child”.
It is because the Convention stipulates that a child shall be entitled to special protection and assistance and that States Parties shall take all appropriate national, bilateral and multilateral measures to prevent the abduction of, the sale of or traffic in children for any purpose or in any form. It also states that States Parties shall protect the child against all other forms of exploitation.
In other words, the U.S. not ratifying the Convention signifies its public statement to the effect that it opposes the prevention of the abduction of, the sale of or traffic in children and will continue to regard children as the target of exploitation.
In early March, the New York Times carried an article about the explosive increase in illegal child labour in the U.S., revealing that hundreds of thousands of children are being subjected to hard and dangerous labour in mines, farms, meat processing factories and metallurgical plants – hard evidence for the above claim.
It is the most extreme case of the guilty party filing the suit first that the U.S. with such a dismal human rights situation is picking on “human rights issue” of other countries and posing as a “human rights judge”.
The international community is regarding the American society with contempt, where children fall victim to human traffickers, the easy money seekers.
There is no future in the U.S. where children, the very future of the country, are being subjected to exploitation and pressure.