NEW YORK, Jan 14: Global support for the “war on terrorism” is diminishing partly because the United States too often neglects human rights in its conduct of the war, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Tuesday in releasing its World Report.
The 558-page report covers the human rights situation in 58 countries last year. It identifies positive trends such as the formal end to wars in Angola, Sudan, and Sierra Leone, as well as peace talks in Sri Lanka.
But the HRW underscored that negative developments included the outbreak of serious communal violence in Gujarat, India, and the continued killing of civilians in wars from Colombia to Chechnya, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The United States is far from the world’s worst human rights abuser,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “But Washington has so much power today that when it flouts human rights standards, it damages the human rights cause worldwide.”
The report said the US government policies adopted after the attacks of Sept 11, 2001, profoundly altered the human rights landscape in 2002.
Although United States citizens continued to enjoy a broad range of civil liberties and government leaders at all levels responded promptly and often effectively to the wave of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate crimes that immediately followed the attacks, 2002 was marked by significant steps backward on human rights, the HRW said.
The arbitrary detention of non-citizens, secret deportation hearings for persons suspected of connections to terrorism, the authorization of military commissions to try non-citizen terrorists, the failure to abide by the Geneva Conventions in the treatment of detainees held by the United States in Cuba, and military detention without charge or access to counsel of US citizens designated as “enemy combatants”, were among the US actions that indicated the failure of the Bush administration to respect human rights and humanitarian law in its anti-terrorist campaign.
These measures primarily affected non-citizens, eroding their basic rights and due process protections. Long-standing human rights problems in the United States continued as well, including police abuse, application of the death penalty, over-incarceration of low-level offenders, primarily African-Americans and the poor, and the treatment of prisoners.
On the anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks, President George Bush asserted, as he had throughout the year, that the United States campaign against Al Qaeda was a fight for freedom, the rule of law and human dignity.
Nevertheless, many of the steps taken by the US government to protect the country against terrorism belied the very principles the president pledged to defend, the HRW report observed.
The United States government detained three discrete groups of people in the aftermath of Sept 11. At least twelve hundred non-citizens were detained in connection with the terrorist investigation in the US. The second group consisted of almost six hundred captured combatants.
Some twelve hundred non-citizens, mostly from the Middle East or South Asia, some of whom were legal permanent residents, were arrested in connection with the investigation of the Sept 11 attacks, although the government has never disclosed the exact number.
At least 752 were held on immigration charges; the others were held on criminal charges or as material witnesses. Four have been indicted for terrorism-related crimes.
CLOAK OF SECRECY: The HRW noted “although immigration detention and proceedings have traditionally been public in the United States, the Department of Justice extended a cloak of secrecy over the ‘special interest’ detainees — non-citizens held on immigration charges in connection with the Sept 11 investigation. It refused to reveal the names of those detainees as well as those held as material witnesses, their place of incarceration, and whether they had attorneys, arguing the release of such information might aid terrorists attempting to interfere with the post-Sept 11 investigation and threaten national security”.
The government also insisted that deportation proceedings against the “special interest” detainees be conducted in secret — as of June, over 600 proceedings had been held which were closed to the detainees’ family, friends, the press, and the public at large.
In so doing, the Department of Justice circumvented the greater safeguards in the criminal law — including the requirement of probable cause for arrest, the right to a court-appointed attorney and the right to be brought before a judge within 48 hours of arrest.
The Department of Justice also instituted new immigration policies that weakened existing protections against arbitrary detention. For example, it issued a new rule allowing it to keep detainees in jail despite immigration judges’ orders.
The Human Rights Watch said the Bush administration seemed to recognize the connection between repression and terrorism in its “national security strategy”, and had taken some steps to promote human rights in countries directly involved in the struggle against terrorism, such as Egypt and Uzbekistan.
The United States has also tried to advance human rights in places where the war was not implicated, including Myanmar, Belarus and Zimbabwe.
Yet the US government’s engagement on human rights has been compromised by its unwillingness to confront a number of crucial partners, and its refusal to be bound by standards it preaches to others, the report observed.
“To fight terrorism, you need the support of people in countries where the terrorists live,” said Roth. “Cozying up to oppressive governments is hardly a way to build those alliances.”
In China, the HRW said, the Bush administration had downplayed the “repression” of Muslims in the northwestern Xinjiang province, which the Chinese government justifies as an anti-terrorist measure.
The report also dwelt on the human rights position in Saudi Arabia. It said that since Saudi Arabia was an important regional player, the US government rarely challenged it on human rights.
The Bush administration is seeking to reinvigorate ties to the Indonesian military, despite the lack of accountability for its serious human rights abuses and the military’s support for militia groups that foster instability, the HRW observed.
About Afghanistan, the report bemoaned the reluctance of the United States to expand the international peacekeeping forces that could help bring stability to the country. Instead, the HRW noted, Washington was relying on abusive warlords who were inhibiting the human rights progress made possible by the fall of the Taliban.
TREATMENT OF SUSPECTS: In addition, Washington has ignored human rights standards in its own treatment of terrorist suspects, the study said. It has refused to apply the Geneva Conventions to prisoners of war from Afghanistan, and has misused the designation of “enemy combatant” to apply to criminal suspects on US soil.
The Bush administration has also abused immigration laws to deny criminal suspects their rights, the survey said.
The “war against terror” has provided an excuse for other Western countries to slacken their support for human rights. European leaders virtually abandoned efforts to pressure Russia, an anti-terror ally, to end its abusive conduct of the war in Chechnya, the report said.
In a significant note the Human Rights Watch said that it did not take a position on the possible war in Iraq, and believed that its most important contribution to reducing the civilian suffering that war entailed was to monitor and promote the compliance by all warring parties with international humanitarian law.
The HRW’s Executive Director noted that the more the US government officials cite Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s human rights record as one reason to topple him, the greater their obligation to minimize the potentially serious human rights consequences of any war in Iraq.
The United States should take all feasible measures to protect Iraqi civilians from acts of revenge by Saddam Hussein, including the possible use of weapons of mass destruction, the watchdog urged.
The HRW said “terrorists violate basic human rights principles because they target civilians. But the United States undermines those principles when it overlooks human rights abuses by anti-terror allies such as Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia and Afghan warlords”, Human Rights Watch said in its annual survey of human rights around the world.