A dismaying press statement by Pierre Sané, secretary general of Amnesty International, March 22, 1999, exhorting members of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to clean up their own acts:

Victims in places like Algeria, Cambodia, Turkey, and the Great Lakes Region of Africa have been let down by governments' failure to match human rights rhetoric with adequate support for action. Amnesty International will highlight these four examples together with the USA—where a persistent and widespread pattern of human rights violations appears to disproportionally affect people of racial or ethnic minority backgrounds.... The United States of America, despite its claims to international leadership in the field of human rights and its many institutions to protect individual civil liberties, is failing to deliver the fundamental promise of rights for all.

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