In 1999, countless cases of the United States' violation of human rights in other countries were reported. In March 1999, over 400 Canadians, representing more than 1,000 victims of contaminated blood transfusions received from prisoners in the United States, filed a class action suit in a US court for compensation.

Despite the fact that it was known as early as 1980 that blood transfusions from prisoners, many of whom are homosexual and/or drug addicts, might lead to AIDS, the United States continued to export the plasma to Canada, Japan, Europe and other countries. The practice has caused thousands of recipients to be infected with AIDS, hepatitis C and other diseases. Preliminary estimates show that the number of victims of the tainted plasma in North America and Caribbean Region exceeded 10,000.

On April 6, 1999, a Russian newspaper, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, reported that after the attack on Pearl Harbour, over 120,000 Japanese-Americans were arrested without charges and held in remote camps in desert areas.

The newspaper said the Japanese-Americans were still in prison at the end of World War II.

On June 22, 1999, Hong Kong-based newspaper the South China Morning Post reported that during the Viet Nam War, the United States sprayed 42 million litres of bio-chemicals in non-military zones in rural Viet Nam, an act which still affects 5 million Vietnamese and has left 600,000 seriously ill.

In early October 1999, American media such as the Associated Press and Newsweek magazine, citing eyewitness accounts from American veterans and survivors, reported that in July 1950, the early period of the Korean War, US troops massacred hundreds of Korean refugees, including women and children, with machine-guns in No Gun Ri.

According to a report released by Reuters on October 6, an apartheid-era germ and chemical warfare campaign against blacks in South Africa was based on a US Government biological and chemical programme. On October 25, British weekly magazine New Statesman quoted a new book about the United States and biological warfare by two Canadian scholars as reporting that after World War II, the United States secretly granted pardons to Japanese war criminals who participated in human biochemical weapons experiments in China. The United States used their experimental results to develop biochemical weapons that they later used against China and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea during the Korean War.

US human rights violations have shown no signs of decreasing with the appearance of the new millennium. On January 13, Staff Sergeant Frank Ronghi, a US soldier with the Kosovo peacekeeping force, was arrested and transferred to the US army's central prison in Germany after he allegedly sexually assaulted and murdered a 12-year-old Kosovo girl.

Following the case of three US soldiers who gang-raped a Japanese girl in Okinawa in 1995, which triggered mass protests in Japan, an alleged rape attempt of a Japanese woman by a soldier of US Navy in a dance hall in Okinawa on January 14 is another example of human rights violations by US troops based in other countries.

The United States ranks first in military spending in the world, with the 1999 total reaching US$287.9 billion, about 150 per cent of the combined military expenditures of the European Union, Japan, Russia and China that year.

The US military budget for 2000 is expected to reach US$300 billion, exceeding the record high of US$291.1 billion in the mid-1980s, when the United States was conducting a "Star Wars" programme and a large-scale arms race against the Soviet Union.The United States was the world's biggest arms supplier for the eighth consecutive year, from 1991 to 1998.

With its powerful military strength, the United States uses its military might to indulge in aggressive wars, violating sovereignty and human rights of other countries. It used its military force overseas more than 40 times in the 1990s.

In 1999, ignoring the international norms and bypassing the United Nations Security Council, the US-led NATO forces launched 78 days of air strikes against the sovereign state of Yugoslavia, a war in the name of "avoiding humanitarian disaster," causing the biggest humanitarian catastrophe in Europe since the end of World War II.

During the war, US-led NATO air forces completed 32,000 sorties and dropped 21,000 tons of bombs on Yugoslavia, equivalent to four times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, by the United States during World War II.

The bombs used by US-led NATO in their aggression against Yugoslavia include cluster bombs, depleted uranium bombs and other weapons banned by international laws and newly developed but more destructive weapons such as electromagnetic pulse bombs and graphite bombs.

More than 2,000 innocent civilians were killed and 6,000 injured in Yugoslavia during the air strikes, which also left nearly 1 million people homeless and more than 2 million without any source of income.

The large-scale bombing paralyzed manufacturing facilities and infrastructure for daily life in Yugoslavia, bringing about a 33 per cent increase in unemployment and pushing 20 per cent of the population below the poverty line, leading to direct economic losses of US$600 billion and producing lasting and disastrous impact on the ecological environment of Yugoslavia and Europe as a whole.

Worse still, NATO went so far as to bomb the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia, killing three Chinese journalists and seriously damaging embassy buildings, in gross violation of Chinese sovereignty and human rights. The United States has also maintained a poor record in participating in and observing international conventions on human rights.

The United States is the only country other than Somalia that has not yet joined the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and one of the few countries that have not yet signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. It has been 23 years since the United States signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, but it still has not ratified the covenant.

The United States has refused to recognize the superiority of international laws over its domestic laws, and made numerous statements and rationalizations regarding international conventions on human rights according to its domestic laws.

As for the international conventions on human rights it has ratified or joined, the US federal government has simply let its states go their own ways and refused to meet obligations to implement them nationwide. It has even failed to hand in reports of implementation on time as required, and has ignored criticism and comments from other United Nations organizations.

The United States does not have a good human rights record of its own, but likes to play the role of the world's human rights judge. It makes unwarranted accusations about other countries' human rights records year after year.

The US Government needs to keep an eye on its own human rights problems, mind its own business and stop interfering in the internal affairs of other countries.