Human Rights Abuses

The reason why Human Rights are called that way, is because they’re the rights for every single human in the world. It shouldn’t matter what race, gender, age, political view, religion or opinion you have. If Human Rights exist, then people should be protected. However, many countries, create ‘laws’ to protect those right, but don’t really care if people follow those them or not. For example, Bolivia has been having problems in the criminal justice system for many years, but the government does nothing to improve itself. Bolivian law claims to give people freedom of speech and of the press. However, it’s not a secret that the government has been censoring the media ever since this law has been made, and journalists can actually serve time in prison for writing or saying ‘wrong’ information. The press is not the only group of people in Bolivia who has little rights. Women are being constantly abused. Everybody knows it, including the government, but nobody seems to care. Even though there are laws against any kind of women abuses, including marital rape, whenever an act of violence is committed against a woman, chances are, whoever did it is not going to be punished. In addition to women, children of Bolivia suffer as well. In schools, teachers are allowed to beat kids, ages 11 to 16 if they feel that it’s necessary.  There is no minimum age for marriage in Bolivia, so parents sell their kids into marriage, which eventually turns into human trafficking or prostitution. Many kids live in prison with their parents, and have no rights for proper childhood and many live on the streets. Again, Bolivian government created many offices around the country, to ‘protect children’s human rights’, but all of that is for a show off and barely anybody actually works by justice. In addition to the press, women and children, there are many more groups of people who have little or no human rights in Bolivia. Those include, disabled people, indigenous people, asylum-seekers, gays, prisoners and many more. The Bolivian government is full of corruption and needs to be put under some type of supervision. There are more civil people than there are people in the government. There should be more protests against government’s ignorance, because if those people don’t do anything, then nothing will change. They do have elections, and even though many times there’s corruption there too, they should start choosing more carefully, to find someone who could give them the human rights, that they deserve, just  as everyone else on this planet. I think that in this case, the US should interfere with human rights abuses, because everybody knows about whats going on in Bolivia, so now its time for somebody to actually do something about it. The US has enough power to take action and help all of the people who are suffering everyday in the cities of Bolivia.

Sources:

http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/bolivia

http://fsdinternational.org/country/bolivia/hropps

http://internationalpoliticalforum.com/bolivias-new-child-labor-law-a-violation-of-human-rights/

By Caterina Arnautova G-Band