Ferguson a wake-up call for US

For decades, the American government and elite have been using human rights as a weapon against other countries. The US has been publishing white papers every year passing judgment on other countries' human rights records - as if it were the official arbitrator of human rights performance in the world - while continuing to rampantly violate human rights both at home and abroad blatantly.

In New York City, police stop and frisk about 600,000 people, mostly minority youths, every year, and on average about 20 percent of these people are arrested for resisting arrest. These American citizens are stopped and frisked by their own police for no good reason except for being minorities. In any other country, this kind of blatant discrimination against the minority population would invoke serious condemnations by the US and international human rights organizations. But since such police harassment takes place in the US, the only superpower, most human rights organizations tend to turn a blind eye to it.

The land of the free, with its rule of law and 5 percent of the world population, accounts for 25 percent of the world's prisoners. There are more than 2.2 million people in US prisons, many of which are overcrowded. So serious is the overcrowding problem and the need to restore some order in prisons that the US Supreme Court has ordered the California state administration to release prisoners prematurely.