Why The Japanese Internment Camps

Julia Espino

Mrs. Yates

English 9a Per. 1

11/30/14

Human Rights Paper Rough Draft

“We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small..” (UNC). In 1942, during World War II, Japanese Internment Camps were created and acted as a prison for families. These camps infringed peoples protection from “severe political, legal, and social abuses” (Nickel). Although the government have legitimate reasons, such as war, these excuses do not outweigh the violation of the Japanese Americans’ rights, like freedom and privacy. The Japanese Internment Camps forced Japanese Americans to leave their

It all began, as Matsuzawa states, with “the Executive Order 9066 Act…issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941,…based on ethnicity and permitted the United States military to bypass or emit constitutional safeguards of American citizens in the name of national defense”. This was an important factor, made by the government, in the violation of human rights and defeats the purpose of why the federal government is present here today, to protect and defend the rights of the people who elected them. Instead of making law, which assures the safety of citizens, the government made a law that is contradictory to their promises. In a book called Behind Barbed Wire, Lila Perl explains the

The camps explain how people were treated and their conditions. Perl explains the lack of respect for the people, where they were “wearing tags with numbers on them instead of names…” (50). Furthermore, the people were disregarded as humans and instead like animals who were herded and gathered together in their cages, by the tyrannous government. They were handles without consideration and reverence but instead, treated with disdain and dislike, tainting their honor. An actual victim of these camps, from a film trailer, states another misdemeanor of their rights. She describes “the total lack of privacy, especially in the toilets”, where the concealment of their private lives have been broken. As a result, many people, especially girls, felt uncomfortable and distressed because of the absence of decency in the place they were forced to live in. This can lead to sexual harassment and increase the amount of crime in the camps, which many can manage to do without being punished and persecuted because the situations in the camps were neglected. As shown above, the privileges or rights created by the government were seized form them, leaving them in