Washington – The European Union should take the lead in promoting respect for human rights internationally because the United States, its reputation sullied by harsh treatment of suspected terrorists, has forfeited that role, a leading rights group said Thursday.
In a 556-page report, the New York-based Human Rights Watch also said rights conditions in China “deteriorated significantly” in 2006 as authorities confronted rising social unrest with “stricter controls of the press, Internet, academics and lawyers.”
The report found a “further deterioration” in rights protection in Russia, symbolized by the murder last fall of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
Egypt, meanwhile, displayed a “heavy hand” against political dissent in 2006 by renewing emergency rule for an additional two years, which provided a continued basis for arbitrary detention and trials before military and state security courts, the report said.
As for Israel, the report accused the Israeli Defense Forces of violating the laws of war “by failing to distinguish between combatants and civilians” during the summer conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
With Washington’s role on the rights front diminished, the European Union “should be the strongest and most effective defender of human rights,” wrote the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth.
But, he added, the EU’s effort to achieve consensus among its diverse members “is so laborious that it yields a faint shadow of its potential.”
Roth described a “demise of U.S. credibility as an effective promoter of human rights.”
“While the United States can still talk in broad terms about democracy,” he told reporters, “it cannot credibly combat efforts to” detain terror suspects without cause.
In an essay at the start of the report, Roth wrote that the voice of the United States “now rings hollow – an enormous loss for the human rights cause.”
“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,” he added.
Perhaps the low point for the administration, he said, occurred in September when he said President Bush offered a defense of torture.
At the time, Bush acknowledged that CIA interrogation techniques were tough but said they fell short of torture, calling them “an alternative set of (interrogation) procedures.” He promoted their effectiveness, saying they helped take “potential mass murderers off the streets.”
