US leading attack on HR, says Amnesty: Guantanamo described as ‘gulag of our times’
LONDON, May 25: The United States has undermined respect for human rights across the world with its efforts to weaken absolute opposition to torture, Amnesty International charged on Wednesday in its report for 2004. In a sobering review of human rights across the globe, Amnesty said tactics to fight the ‘war on terror’ in Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe had failed to prevent horrific attacks on civilians, although they had encouraged rampant abuse of human rights.
Launching the report in London, Amnesty Secretary General Irene Khan accused the international community of lacking the will power and the means to prevent and punish atrocities, citing the failure to curb crises in Darfur, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Haiti.
She also said governments flaunted rule of law with impunity, noting perennial rights violators such as Russia, which continued abuses in Chechnya, as well as Egypt, Israel, Nepal and the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan.
But for the second year running, the London-based group faulted Washington for leading the attack on human rights with its ‘war on terror’.
“When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity and audacity,” Irene Khan said.
The rhetoric of freedom and justice was being used to ‘redefine and sanitize torture’, Irene Khan said, citing US military terms used to hide mistreatment of prisoners like ‘stress positions’ and ‘sensory manipulation’.
Amnesty called the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where hundreds of foreign terror suspects are held indefinitely, the ‘gulag of our times’, referring to the notorious prison camps of the Soviet Union.
And it slammed Washington’s alleged use of ‘rendering’ — the secret transfer of detainees to countries known to practise torture — and its continued refusal to hold a broad investigation despite many reports of detainee abuse from Afghanistan to Iraq.
Terrorism rose in tandem with increasing abuse by governments, defying US promises to make the world safer in the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks in 2001, the group noted in the overarching, 308-page review of 131 countries.
In Iraq, instances of US and British abuse of detainees ran parallel to gross human rights violations by guerillas who killed thousands of civilians and staged a series of gruesome executions of foreign hostages.
Lawlessness in Afghanistan, alongside reported US abuse of prisoners, continued to cast a shadow over the post-Taliban government there, Amnesty noted.
In Russia, both Chechen armed groups and federal security forces committed atrocities against civilians, spreading instability beyond the borders of the separatist Caucasus republic.
Amnesty noted the crisis in Beslan, in the nearby republic of North Ossetia, where an estimated 350 people died in September in a hostage-taking at a public school.
