'US key violator of human rights'

Guantanamo detention camp (file photo)

Source: Press TV
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/170310.html

Italy's International Educational Commission for Peace says the US is a key violator of human rights on an international level for breaking many globally recognized rights.

In an interview with IRNA, the commission's president, Massimo De Santi, recalled that the US was the first country to use nuclear weapons in Japan in 1945, bringing about deaths, illnesses, and long-term genetic mutations.

They also experimented various viruses in Latin America, causing agricultural damage, De Santi said.

He noted that the US also contaminated he soil of these countries for decades by using 72 million liters of grass and weed killer poison between 1961 and 1971.

De Santi said that back in the 1940's, the US used prisoners, military figures, and civilians in Guatemala as guinea pigs to determine if penicillin could be a cure for syphilis and similar diseases.

Today we are witnessing more violations of human rights by the US in Afghanistan and Iraq.

He also referred to US President Barack Obama's failure to meet his pledge of closing down the Guantanamo Bay detention center within a year after taking office. Obama was ironically given the Nobel Peace Prize, De Santi said.

This is another example among many of America's violations of human rights, he added.

The prisoners at the detention center have not yet been on trial for their supposed crimes. Many have been imprisoned for nearly ten years.

De Santi predicts that a possible military intervention in Libya could be Washington's next violation of human rights.