US no longer credible on human rights, group says

The European Union (EU) must take a global lead in promoting human rights now that the Guantánamo Bay prison camp and the torture of terrorism suspects has left Washington's voice "hollow" on the issue, a leading US human rights group said on Jan. 11. While the Bush administration can still promote democracy, "it cannot credibly advocate rights that it flouts," Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a scathing introduction to its annual report. "Quite apart from the fallout of its ill-fated Iraq invasion, its credibility as a proponent of human rights has been tarnished by the abuses it practices in the name of fighting terrorism," HRW's executive director, Kenneth Roth, wrote. "Few US ambassadors dare to protest another government's harsh interrogations, detention without trial or even 'disappearances,' knowing how easily an interlocutor could turn the tables and cite US misconduct as an excuse for his government's own abuses." With internal abuses worsening last year in the other major global powers, China and Russia, it was up to the EU to be the "strongest and most effective defender of human rights," Roth said. However, with the bloc concentrating on its expanding membership it was currently "punching well below its weight," he said. "Its effort to achieve consensus among its diverse members has become so laborious that it yields a faint shadow of its potential. [The EU] was supposed to enhance Europe's influence. Instead, when it comes to promoting human rights, the whole has been less than the sum of its parts." The 568-page annual report, issued on the fifth anniversary of detention of terror suspects without trial at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, assesses the human rights situation in 74 countries or regions. It focuses on rights abuses in Russia and China–where HRW said rights "deteriorated significantly" in 2006–as well as North Korea, Iran and Sudan. However, the introduction focused its fire most clearly on HRW's home nation, notably the Bush administration's defense last year of the use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, in which someone is led to believe they are about to drown. "The last year dispelled any doubt that the Bush administration's use of torture and other mistreatment was a matter of policy dictated at the top rather than the aberrant misconduct of a few low-level interrogators," Roth wrote. "Though never a consistent promoter of human rights, Washington has been a prominent and influential one. Yet its voice now rings hollow–an enormous loss for the human rights cause," he said. HRW also noted a worsening of the human rights situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were invaded by US-led forces with the intention of installing democracy. "By late 2006 Afghanistan was on the precipice of again becoming a haven for human rights abusers, criminals and militant extremists," the report said. In a separate essay introducing the report, HRW's Peggy Hicks called for the new UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to speak out in defense of global rights, while warning that his native country of South Korea had a "limited track record" on the issue. "As South Korea's foreign minister, he was willing to subordinate human rights concerns to other objectives in his country's dialogue with North Korea," she wrote. "In his new position, he will need to take on those who want to overlook human rights for the sake of political expediency and confront those responsible for human rights abuses."