NEW YORK, May 28: Human rights abuses worsened in many Asian countries, particularly in the context of the “war against terrorism” as well as “crackdowns on crime,” the London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International said in its annual report released on Wednesday

In the name of combating “terrorism”, governments stepped up the repression of their political opponents, detained people arbitrarily, and introduced sweeping and often discriminatory laws that undermined the very foundations of international human rights and humanitarian law in several countries, including Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, the Republic of Korea and Australia, the report said. In Pakistan, the AI said that human rights abuses committed in the context of the government’s continued support for the US-led “war on terrorism” included the arbitrary detention of hundreds of people suspected of having links with “terrorist” organizations and their transfer to the custody of US officials.

The Pakistani authorities handed over more than 400 people to US custody without adequate human rights safeguards, in breach of domestic legislation regarding extradition. In addition, systemic human rights violations, including torture, deaths in custody and extrajudicial killings, continued. Abuses committed against women, children and religious minorities continued to be ignored.

At least 140 people were sentenced to death in 2002 and eight were executed, the report added.

Amnesty International said that in India the right of minorities to live in the country as equals was increasingly undermined by both state and non-state actors, despite it being clearly asserted in the Constitution.

“In Gujarat, Muslims were victims of massacres allegedly masterminded by nationalist groups with the connivance of state agencies. New and stringent security legislation, which gives wide powers of arrest and detention to the police, was misused to target political dissent in areas of armed conflict and elsewhere. Human rights defenders were frequently harassed by state and private actors, and their activities labelled as anti- national.

“The criminal justice system remained extremely slow, under- resourced and difficult to access for people from socially and economically marginalized sections of society, including lower castes and women. Security agencies continued to enjoy virtual impunity for past abuses, thanks to specific provisions contained in security legislation and to political protection. International human rights monitors, including UN independent experts and international human rights organizations, were de facto denied access to areas of armed conflict and were granted only very limited access to the rest of the country.”

The report pointed out that Hindu nationalist groups continued to push their communal agenda, particularly the issue of the reconstruction of a Hindu temple in Ayodhya at the site where a mosque was destroyed in 1992, through violence and the penetration of institutions, leading to an increasing fragmentation of society on religious lines.

KASHMIR: The report noted that the “ongoing tensions between India and Pakistan were heightened by renewed claims by the Indian government that armed opposition groups active in Kashmir were enjoying Pakistan’s support. This claim received international legitimization in the context of the campaign against “terrorism” led by the US and supported by the Indian government. The result was a military stand-off on the India-Pakistan border, which started de-escalating only in October.

The report said that the world’s attention was still on Afghanistan, where grave human rights abuses and armed conflict continued. Millions of Afghans — both refugees and those who had remained in the country — faced an uncertain and insecure future. There were widespread abuses of the rights of people detained as suspected Al Qaeda members or alleged “terrorists.” More than 600 people, captured during the war in Afghanistan, continued to be held at the US base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and an unknown number in Bagram, Afghanistan.

Concerns about the treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan continued with reports of dangerous overcrowding, lack of food and medicine, and lack of shelter from severe winter conditions. While the Afghan interim authority is formally responsible for detention facilities, under international law, the US has continuing responsibilities for the welfare of prisoners who were in US custody before being handed over to another country.

The AI said that in Bangladesh the government repealed the Public Safety Act, but continued to detain people under the Special Powers Act which overrides safeguards in Bangladeshi law against arbitrary detention. Additionally in October, some 40,000 army personnel were deployed across the country in a joint army-police crackdown on crime under the name “Operation Clean Heart.”

By the end of the year, more than 10,000 people, including members of the opposition and ruling political parties, had been arrested. At least 38 men died, allegedly as a result of torture in army custody. Despite international calls for independent inquiries into these deaths, no investigations were carried out.

A WORLD MORE UNSAFE: The report said the US “war on terror” had made the world more dangerous by curbing human rights, undermining international law and shielding governments from scrutiny.

In a scathing denunciation of the US and the UK, the AI said that the policies pursued by the US and Britain in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, had made the world more unsafe.

If the war on terror was supposed to make the world safer, it has failed, and has given governments an excuse to abuse human rights in the name of state security, it said.

“What would have been unacceptable on September 10, 2001, is now becoming almost the norm,” Amnesty’s secretary-general Irene Khan told a news conference in London, accusing Washington of adopting “a new doctrine of human rights a la carte”.

“The United States continues to pick and choose which bits of its obligations under international law it will use, and when it will use them,” she said, highlighting the detention without charge or trial of hundreds of prisoners in Afghanistan and in a US military camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“By putting these detainees into a legal black hole, the US administration appeared to continue to support a world where arbitrary unchangeable detention becomes acceptable.”

Amnesty urged the world to do more to sort out Iraq’s problems now that the Gulf War is over. “There is a very real risk that Iraq will go the way of Afghanistan if no genuine effort is made to heed the call of the Iraqi people for law and order and full respect of human rights,” Ms Khan said. “Afghanistan does not present a record of which the international community can be proud.”

The Amnesty accused Israel of committing gross human rights violations in the occupied territories noting that “at least 1,000 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army, most of them unlawfully. They included some 150 children and at least 35 individuals killed in targeted assassinations. Palestinian armed groups killed more than 420 Israelis, at least 265 of them civilians and including 47 children, and some 20 foreign nationals, in targeted or indiscriminate attacks.”

AI said that certain abuses committed by the Israeli army constituted war crimes. These included unlawful killings, obstruction of medical assistance and targeting of medical personnel, extensive and wanton destruction of property, torture and cruel and inhuman treatment, unlawful confinement and the use of “human shields.” The deliberate targeting of civilians by Palestinian armed groups constituted crimes against humanity. At least 158 Israeli conscientious objectors and reservists who refused to serve in the Occupied Territories were imprisoned. Several Israeli soldiers and settlers were arrested on charges of selling weapons and munitions to armed Palestinian groups, and four Israeli settlers were arrested and charged with attempting to bomb a Palestinian school, AI said.