Former president Jimmy Carter in a recent New York Times op-ed titled ‘A Cruel and Unusual Record‘ says the United States and specifically the Obama Administration is engaged in such widespread abuse of human rights that we can “no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues.”
The United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.
Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended.
Our government is now violating at least 10 of the 30 articles in the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights including the prohibition against cruel and inhuman punishment, says Carter. This is made all the worse by the United States being a primary leader of adoption of the Declaration in 1948. We are now violating precepts that we used to champion.