January 17, 2002	Thursday	Ziqa’ad 2, 1422

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 16: A major human rights group warned the United States on Wednesday that its “campaign against terrorism” too often inspired allies to revoke civil liberties for political ends, whether in Egypt, Uzbekistan, Russia or even in Europe.

And new restrictions in the United States, such as the proposed military tribunals for suspected terrorists, could compromise Washington’s ability to criticize rights abuses in other nations, Human Rights Watch said in its annual 670-page report covering 66 nations.

“Terrorists believe that anything goes in the name of their cause,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of the New York-based group. “The fight against terror must not buy into that logic.

“For too many countries, the anti-terror mantra has provided a new reason to ignore human rights,” he said.

Declaring the Sept 11 attacks antithetical to human rights values, the report said too many governments substituted expediency for a firm commitment to human rights, closed channels for dissent and thus encouraged radical groups.

Uzbekistan’s government was singled out in the report as particularly repressive and an illustration of the West’s selectivity on human rights. The country has no political parties and no independent media. Muslims caught praying outside the state-controlled mosque are tortured and given long prison sentences.

But as a state bordering Afghanistan, and with its own Al Qaeda-linked rebel government, Uzbekistan was an obvious potential military ally of the United States. It also has been kept off the State Department list of countries that repress religious freedom, the report said.

In Europe, Human Rights Watch said, too many countries stepped up anti-immigrant rhetoric and further restricted the rights of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, in the name of fighting terrorism.

Britain has proposed emergency anti-terrorism legislation that would deny some asylum seekers an individual hearing, classify as a “terrorist” any foreigner with ill-defined “links” to terrorist organizations, and allow authorities to indefinitely detain them.

In Hungary, all Afghan refugees were transported to special detention facilities. In Greece, some migrants arriving on ships were denied access to asylum procedures and given fifteen-day expulsion orders.

“In the long term, this trend is counterproductive,” Human Rights Watch said. “If the logic of terrorism, not just immediate terrorist threats, is ultimately to be defeated, governments must redouble their commitment to international standards, not indulge in a new round of excuses to ignore them.”

In the Middle East, Human Rights Watch said there was a “shameful silence” by the United States and other Western nations of abuses in Saudi Arabia, as well as in Egypt.

“They leave people with the desperate choice of tolerating the status quo, exile or violence. Frequently as political options are closed off, the voices of nonviolent dissent are upstaged by a politics of radical opposition,” it said.

Thus Saudi Arabia and Egypt can credibly portray themselves as bulwarks against extremism because the political centre has been “systemically silenced”, the report said.

Since the Sept 11 attacks against the United States, several governments touted their own domestic struggles as fights against terrorism, the report contended.

In Russia, Human Rights Watch accused President Vladimir Putin of embracing the anti-terrorist rhetoric to defend his government’s brutal campaign in Chechnya and the West downplaying earlier criticism of Moscow’s abuses.—Reuters