One of the world’s most courageous and longest-serving prisoners of conscience is also someone you have probably never heard of. The American government and US news media have made sure of that. This is especially glaring considering the US State Department has just announced the winners of its annual Global Human Rights Defender Awards. It is indeed the height of cruel irony that the world’s worst warmongering nation, consistent violator of global human rights and perpetrator of war crimes has set itself up as the judge and jury of other countries’ records, especially those it deems hostile. However, I have no doubt those 10 winners deserve recognition, including Ding Jiaxi, a mainland Chinese human rights lawyer associated with the New Citizens’ Movement, who was tried in secret for “subversion of state power” last year with no verdict announced. If only that recognition came from a more credible source. Many independent human rights advocates would have recognised Ana Belén Montes, a former US defence intelligence analyst who was jailed for providing secret information to the Cuban government to defend itself against American aggression. She was released last month after serving 20 of a 25-year sentence. A Puerto Rican, she has released a statement denouncing the six-decade US blockade of Cuba and the neglect of the hardships endured by the Puerto Rican people by the US government. Inflated China threat marks the return of US cold war rhetoric She is a traitor so far as America is concerned, just like Edward Snowden is. But to the rest of the world, they are heroes for exposing their own government’s crimes and malevolence. At her trial, she said: “I obeyed my conscience rather than the law … giving the island [Cuba] classified information to help it defend itself. “I believe our government’s policy towards Cuba is cruel and unfair, profoundly unneighbourly, and I felt morally obliged to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it.” In court, she accepted her punishment, but she appealed to a higher law of personal conscience. And it’s not just personal. The US embargo is universally condemned. Her moral belief accords with the global opinion against the United States, even if her method was questionable. In November, for the 30th conservative year which also marked the 60th anniversary of the illegal US blockade, 185 countries supported the United Nations resolution condemning it, with only the US and Israel opposing, and Brazil and Ukraine abstaining. West just cannot decide whether it actually wants China to fail Next time someone claims “the whole world” supports or opposes this or that, such as the widespread but false claim by the West that “the whole world” supports Ukraine, remember those US votes, year after year, against the Cuba blockade; that’s what “the whole world” really means. The US is not the whole world, neither are its Western allies. In fact, on many pressing world issues, they are often in the minority of nations. But they monopolise the global narrative machinery by their sheer wealth, power and military muscles, so the lives and fate of people in small countries don’t count, their suffering rarely reported, unless they happen to have a strategic value. In that case, as in Ukraine, their human rights and saintly significance are suddenly elevated to absurdly new heights. What the whole world really wants now is an immediate ceasefire leading to a peace settlement in Ukraine, and a permanent end to the illegal and inhumane blockade against tiny Cuba. But they won’t happen any time soon. That’s because despite its famous Declaration of Independence, the US as the world’s dominant power does not have “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind”, but rather a profound disregard for them.