That’s the verdict of a propagandistic human rights report issued by North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency. Nina Strochlic finds the report’s relative accuracy unnerving:
In North Korea, where accurate depictions of human rights never make it into the state-crafted news, the press doesn’t exist to focus investigations inward. But it’s also disturbing that Pyongyang felt little need to load up a report on the U.S. with hyperbole or farce. The words may be overwrought (“Such poor human rights records in the U.S. are an inevitable product of the ruling quarters’ policy against humanity,” one line reads), but the facts are plainly, and uncomfortably, laid out. Something’s off when the most notoriously abusive country in the world has the material to level criticism, even if it has no credibility to do so.
Adam Taylor also looks over the report:
[T]he only truly debatable part is on gun crime. While it’s true that the number of mass shootings has risen in the United States, violent crime in general has dropped over the past few years, with homicide rates down in most major cities. And while the April 10 U.N. report did note that the United States has a high murder rate, the top spot went to Honduras. (KCNA appears to have misread the report, which said the Americas were the region with most gun crime.)
After fact-checking the report in detail, Matt Ford concludes that “Pyongyang’s sins don’t make Washington a saint”:
While it’s easy to dismiss North Korea’s critiques as hypocritical, it isn’t the only country to criticize America’s human-rights record. When asked about Malaysia’s progress on human rights at a press conference in Kuala Lampur this past week, Obama said his host “has still got some work to do. Just like the United States, by the way, has some work to do on these issues. Human Rights Watch probably has a list of things they think we should be doing as a government.”
On cue, Human Rights Watch released that very list, urging the United States to improve its record on mass incarceration, NSA surveillance, and racial discrimination, among other topics.
The Dish 