HRW publishes report on US human rights violations

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According to the report, US laws and practices violate internationally recognized human rights in incarceration, racial disparities, criminal justice, police killing of African Americans and foreign policy to name a few.

“The United States locks up 2.37 million people, the largest reported incarcerated population in the world,” the report says, adding “about 12 million people annually cycle through county jails.”

It says that thirty-one US states still “impose the death penalty” with seven of them carrying out executions in 2014.

Also, 27 people had been executed by lethal injection in the US in 2015, the report revealed.

On racial disparities in criminal justice, the report shows that “while whites and African Americans engage in drug offenses at comparable rates, African Americans are arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated for drug offenses at much higher rates.”

Even though African Americans account for “only 13 percent of the US population, they constitute “29 percent of all drug arrests,” says the report, adding “black men are incarcerated at six times the rate of white men.” (…)