By Xin Ping
As the global hegemon, the U.S. is able to do anything unrestrained. It can invade a country, topple a government, or put innocent people in jail as it pleases. In that particular area, the U.S. undoubtedly has a long and notorious record of arbitrary detention.
To the U.S., those arrests just do not warrant any justification. “My way or the highway”, so the saying goes.
And the U.S. way is to keep those who seem dangerous behind bars, at “bay”, or under house arrest. Arbitrary detention has become a handy political tool of the U.S. government to serve its own interests.
Up to the day of writing, 39 people are detained in the Guantanamo Bay Prison 20 years after it was opened by the U.S. to lock up “extremely dangerous” people considered affiliating to al-Qaeda. But internal documents have shown that less than two dozen detainees were closely linked to the terrorist organization. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a former aide to late Secretary of State Colin Powell, stated openly in 2010 that President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had all known that the majority of people sent to Guantanamo were innocent. Even so, innocence has been considered a non-starter by the Pentagon. There is no category for those seized by mistake in the“status”of the captured. Most of the people have never been on trial or charged, thus stripped of the chance to prove innocence.
The U.S. has scrupulously used the tool of arbitrary detention to suppress its competitors. In 2013, the Alstom’s CEO Frederic Pierucci was arrested at a U.S. airport for corruption without prior notice. He spent altogether 25-plus months in jail, including more than 14 months in a high-security prison banning visits from his children. His imprisonment cleared the way for General Electrics to acquire three quarters of its French competitor’s power and grid business.
Most recently, Huawei’s CFO Meng Wanzhou was detained in Canada on fraud charges at the U.S.’ request for more than 1,000 days with no evidence given by the U.S. or Canada to prove her guilt. Considering that Huawei has been leading the world in 5G development and that the U.S. administration has been going great lengths to stop other countries from using Huawei and hobbling Chinese companies, the incident involving Meng Wanzhou is an act of “long-arm jurisdiction” and out-and-out political framing and manipulation by the U.S..
The U.S. has also arbitrarily imprisoned innocent immigrants and forcibly separated children from their parents, breaking up countless families. According to the Los Angeles Times website, among the 266,000 immigrant children were detained by the U.S. government in recent years, more than 25,000 have been detained for more than 100 days, nearly 1,000 have spent more than a year in refugee shelters, and some have even been detained for more than five years.
Domestically, the arbitrary imprisonment by the U.S. government reflects an unfair law enforcement against Black Americans. A study shows that the U.S. misdemeanor system disproportionately affects people of color, with the black arrest rate at least twice as high as the white arrest rate. Nationally, Black Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of White Americans, and in some states the disparity is far greater. A former mayor of New Orleans wrote on the UN website that people of color in the U.S. represent 37 percent of the U.S. population and 67 percent of prisoners, who are generally subject to greater chance of sentencing and harsher punishment, not to mention the prevalence of pre-trial detention and unequal prosecutorial charging.
Such a list of arbitrary detention conducted by the U.S. goes on. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights clearly stipulates that “no one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”. The U.S. again shows the world its arbitrariness, both in detention and rule-breaking.
