US promotes human rights abroad but refuses to enforce it at home: US media

The phrase "human rights" in US policy has always referred to what others violate, but rarely comes back to what the US government is obligated to protect at home, said an opinion piece published recently by the US magazine Foreign Policy.

The article, titled "America the Unexceptional," was written by David Kaye, a law professor at the University of California Irvine and the U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression.

"Despite its rhetoric and its occasional leadership, the United States has long had its foreign-policy foot inside the human rights system and its domestic one firmly outside," Kaye noted in the commentary. "Treaties and other international obligations that it calls upon others to keep are not even enforceable within the United States itself."

He also pointed out that racism and white supremacy drove the American refusal to enforce human rights at home, and that "legacy of hypocrisy shapes human rights policy today."

The Black Lives Matter protesters have demonstrated what the United States should be, the professor said, calling on Washington to meet a commitment to human rights at home to be a global voice for human rights.