U.S. says open to fair criticism at U.N. rights forum

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United States is open to fair criticism of its human rights record, including racial discrimination and counterterrorism policies, when it is under U.N. scrutiny this week, a U.S. envoy said on Wednesday.

For the first time on Friday, U.S. practices will come under review by the U.N. Human Rights Council which has been gradually examining the performance of all 192 U.N. members.

"We have to be willing to take criticism from all corners. And we've got to be able to take all serious allegations seriously, and I believe we will," U.S. human rights ambassador Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe told reporters.

A bloc of developing countries, many of them Muslim, often allied with Russia and China, dominate the 47-member body set up in 2006 to replace a discredited commission.

The main innovation is that no country escapes its spotlight and must report back on how it has implemented recommendations made by other countries in the review.

Muslim states are likely to raise concerns about abuse of prisoners in Iraq, mounting civilian casualties in Afghanistan, secret detention in the U.S.-led fight against terrorism and the delay in closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Obama administration brought the United States back into the council last year with a promise to focus on traditional Western concerns about civil and political freedoms.

No fewer than three U.S. assistant secretaries of state will lead a delegation made up of some 30 officials from the State Department, Homeland Security, the Pentagon and the Departments of Justice, Labour, Education, and Health and Human Services.

"AT WAR WITH AL QAEDA"

The Obama administration has submitted a 29-page report listing its achievements as a democracy guided by "simple but powerful principles," but admitting to discrimination against blacks and Hispanics and a "broken" immigration system.

"There is no comparison between American democracy and repressive regimes," it declares. "Progress is our goal."

The United States is "currently at war with al Qaeda and its associated forces," it says. The United States would comply with all applicable domestic and international law in armed conflicts and has ordered that foreign detainees be treated humanely.

Jamil Dakwar, director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) human rights program, said: "The report also defends the use of military commissions to try terrorism suspects, despite the fact that military commissions under international law are considered a second class system of justice."

"Guantanamo remains open, we are continuing to hold people indefinitely and holding flawed military commission trials. We are trying children without considering rehabilitation. Omar Khadr was 15 year old," Antonio M. Ginatta of the New York-based group Human Rights Watch told Reuters.

Khadr, a Canadian and Guantanamo's youngest prisoner who was 15 years old when captured in Afghanistan in 2002, was sentenced by a U.S. war crimes tribunal last week to 40 years in prison after admitting to murdering a U.S. soldier. He may only serve a few more years under a plea agreement.

The U.S. report also failed to fully address significant problems, especially the impact on human rights of the economic crisis, Hurricane Katrina and the "militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border" to stop immigrants, ACLU's Dakwar said.

"The United States is the only country in the world that sentences juveniles to life without parole, with 2,400 individuals sentenced to basically die in prison when they committed a crime as a juvenile," Dakwar told Reuters.

Ginatta, advocacy director of Human Rights Watch's U.S. program, voiced alarm at racial discrimination in the justice system and abuse of detainees in U.S. immigration centers.

"We are also concerned how immigration laws are being enforced. States and local governments are trying to run their own immigration policy," he said, citing Arizona's law aimed at cracking down on illegal immigrants.

(Editing by Jonathan Lynn and Charles Dick)