{"id":2587,"date":"2012-05-30T07:00:29","date_gmt":"2012-05-30T11:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sj\/?p=2587"},"modified":"2012-06-26T11:35:39","modified_gmt":"2012-06-26T15:35:39","slug":"awkward-deadpan-rant-china-reviews-human-rights-within-the-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2012\/05\/30\/awkward-deadpan-rant-china-reviews-human-rights-within-the-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Awkward deadpan rant: China reviews human rights within the US"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.chinadaily.com.cn\/cndy\/2012-05\/26\/content_15392452.htm\">This document is difficult to read<\/a>. \u00a0It is a Chinese government doc trying with awkward sincerity to review human rights in the US by our own standards, most of which the authors clearly find arbitrary.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s like a baby wikipedia article: full of random tidbits that happen to have been published somewhere online. \u00a0With a mix of real issues and rumors, minimal context, axe-grinding, and undue weight to whatever attracted media attention. \u00a0It lacks the measure and professionalism of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.state.gov\/j\/drl\/rls\/hrrpt\/humanrightsreport\/index.htm?dynamic_load_id=186268#wrapper\">US report<\/a> it is responding to (though it gets partial credit for making a handwave at its sources, which our reports should do much more of).<\/p>\n<p>But it does point out one oversight in our list of country reports: we do not publish an internal report on developments within the US in the same format &#8212; though the relevant data is gathered by other parts of government. This made me wonder: what sorts of reports do we put out? \u00a0Could we remedy that? \u00a0I was also reminded that plans to set up an umbrella national human rights institution have come and gone&#8230; were any still under active consideration?<\/p>\n<p>So I checked: the closest thing we have to such a report is the quadrennial self-assessment of human rights that we compile (as every UN member should) as part of the UNHRC&#8217;s \u00a0&#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.state.gov\/j\/drl\/upr\/process\/index.htm\">universal periodic review<\/a>&#8221; process. \u00a0What I found was enlightening and surprising, though not always encouraging. \u00a0It is worth its own review; stay tuned for a future recap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This document is difficult to read. \u00a0It is a Chinese government doc trying with awkward sincerity to review human rights in the US by our own standards, most of which the authors clearly find arbitrary. It&#8217;s like a baby wikipedia article: full of random tidbits that happen to have been published somewhere online. \u00a0With a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[207,211,218,212,1],"tags":[359,60632,1457,43486,60634,60633],"class_list":["post-2587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-indescribable","category-international","category-not-so-popular","category-null","category-uncategorized","tag-china","tag-citations","tag-reports","tag-rights","tag-unhrc","tag-universal-periodic-review"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-FJ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2587"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2635,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2587\/revisions\/2635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}