STATE DEPT. ANNUAL HUMAN RIGHTS REPORT GLOSSES OVER TERROR WAR ABUSES

by Eli Clifton

(IPS) WASHINGTON -- The U.S. State Department's annual Human Rights Reports, released Tuesday in Washington, points to the humanitarian disaster in Sudan and the failure of Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf to improve his country's human rights record as some of the concerning trends in international human rights over the past year.

The report starts with an admission that actions taken by the U.S. in the "Global War on Terror" have taken a toll on the United States' reputation as a proponent of the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The latest edition of the Country Reports, which were first mandated by Congress in 1976, covers the human rights situations of nearly 200 countries in 2006 and stretches more than 3,000 pages in length.

As in past years, this year's report does not address rights conditions in the United States or in U.S.-controlled facilities overseas, such as detention centers at the Guantanamo Bay naval base and in Afghanistan where Washington has been holding suspects in its "war on terror" in conditions that some human rights monitors, including several UN Special Rapporteurs, have said amount to "torture."

Countries singled out as making significant improvements over the past year included Liberia, Morocco, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan.

All of these countries were held up as examples of nations with improving human rights records but with significant steps still required to bring them up to an internationally acceptable standard.

(A new study on Liberia by ActionAid, an international development agency based in South Africa, came to a different conclusion this week, saying that "violence against women and rape continue unchecked" in the country.)

Pakistan, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Russia, Venezuela, Fiji, and Thailand were discussed as examples of countries that have turned to greater government centralization and a decline in transparent, democratic governance.

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez and the Bush administration have traded barbs during the past year over disagreements regarding the neoliberal development strategies encouraged by the United States in Latin America and Chavez's expansion of state control over the energy industries in Venezuela.

Pakistan, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Russia and Thailand, are all close partners of the United States in the "global war on terror" and several are rumored to be sites for CIA "black sites" or countries where U.S. prisoners have been sent for torture.

"While Amnesty International welcomes the reports' emphasis on accountability, until the United States changes its own policies of holding detainees indefinitely, in secret prisons and without basic rights, it cannot credibly be viewed as a world human rights leader," said Amnesty International USA executive director Larry Cox, in a press release. "Human rights abuses must not be hidden behind a fa�ade of national security rhetoric."

Criticisms of countries' treatment of prisoners and interrogation techniques do raise questions about the U.S.'s own treatment of prisoners and detainees. "There is a disconnect between the words of the report and America's actions in the world," Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

"Today's reports provide useful data that should be factored into foreign policy decisions," said Cox. "However, if the Bush administration persists in allowing other considerations to trump human rights concerns, the real-world impact of these reports will be greatly diminished."

Countries that have made dramatic steps backwards in both human rights and democratic government included: Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and East Timor.

The world's most systematic human rights abusers, according to the State Department, continue to be those states where power remains concentrated in the hands of "unaccountable rulers."

Countries' placed in this category include North Korea, Burma, Iran, Zimbabwe, Cuba, China, Belarus and Eritrea.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, North Korea, Iran, Cuba and at times China have had strong ideological disagreements with the United States. North Korea and Iran over the past year have engaged in nuclear weapons development programs, against the wishes of the Bush administration and its allies.

The State Department also noted that "as the worldwide push for greater personal and political freedom grows stronger, it is being met with increasing resistance from those who feel threatened by political and societal change."

This resistance has manifested itself in regulations against civil society groups and journalists and extrajudicial violence against journalists in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Syria, Iran, Burundi, Rwanda, Venezuela, China and Vietnam.

Finally, the report does call attention to the mass killings and displacements in the Darfur region of Sudan and the increasing levels of violence in the second half of 2006 which resulted in the withdrawal from a number of NGOs and humanitarian organizations.

Several years ago it was reported that writers of the Country Reports were instructed not to take into account any actions taken by any governments at Washington's request. The instruction was later withdrawn and accusations of such bias have not surfaced in recent years.