By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jan 14 2003 (IPS)

In its most blistering attack on U.S. foreign policy since the 1980s, Human Rights Watch (HRW) Tuesday accused the administration of President George W. Bush of ignoring human rights in pursuit of its ”war on terrorism” and of driving the world toward a ”pre-modern Hobbesian order”.

In the 12-page introduction to its annual ‘World Report’, the New York-based group charged that Washington’s tendency to see human rights ”mainly as an obstacle” to the war on terrorism was both dangerous and counter-productive.

”The United States is far from the world’s worst human rights abuser,” said Kenneth Roth, HRW’s executive director. ”But Washington has so much power today that when it flouts human rights standards, it damages the human rights cause worldwide.”

HRW singled out the administration’s efforts to exempt the United States from international law, for example by opposing the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC), because that imposes limits on U.S. power. Such efforts, it said, belied a ”radical vision of world order”.

”Most governments recognise that a system of law is in their interest over the long run. But that logic breaks down if the superpower routinely exempts itself from the enforcement of international law," added HRW.

”If shared norms give way to relations built on power alone, the world will revert to a pre-modern Hobbesian order. That can hardly be in the long-term interests of the United States or anyone else," the report declared.

As in the past, most of the 558 pages in the 2003 edition of HRW’s ‘World Report’, are devoted to a review of major human rights developments during 2002 in 58 countries, including the status of international law and treaties, and the protection and promotion of the rights of women, children, refugees, and victims of HIV/AIDS.

The report noted some positive trends in 2002 in spite of the effects of the ”war on terror”. Among the most important was the ICC, the first permanent global court to try cases of genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity. Despite U.S. withdrawal from the statute creating the body and its declaration of ”a virtual war on the court”, the ICC will begin operating early this year.

Other key events welcomed by HRW are the start of the long-awaited war crimes trial against former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and independence for East Timor three years after it was devastated by the Indonesian army and army-backed militias. In addition, long-running wars in Angola and Sierra Leone were ended, while in Sudan and Sri Lanka, cease-fires were worked out amid negotiations that could yet end their 20-year-old civil wars.

The report also noted positively African countries’ adoption of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the plan’s commitments to transparent and accountable government, as well as steps taken by the Organisation of American States (OAS) to prevent a coup d’etat against the elected government in Venezuela.

But serious problems also remained unresolved or flared up in 2002 – from deadly communal violence in Gujarat, India and the eruption of a full-scale Maoist outbreak in Nepal, to continuing violence in Colombia, Chechnya, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and between Israelis and Palestinians. Meanwhile, governments in Burma, China, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Liberia, North Korea and Vietnam, among others, continued their repressive rule.

The industrialised nations’ ongoing failure to fund treatment and care for HIV/AIDS victims in Africa and other poor regions, as well as their governments’ efforts to hinder refugees seeking safe haven inside their borders were also noted as major setbacks.

HRW also singled out a surge in large-scale deliberate attacks on civilians, including Russians in Moscow, Australians and other westerners in Bali, Indonesia, Germans in Tunisia, French in Pakistan, and Israelis and Kenyans in Kenya as another worrisome trend during the year, most of it related to attacks by al-Qaeda or its allies.

It is precisely these kinds of attacks against innocent civilians that illustrates how ”terrorism is antithetical to human rights”, said the report, which stressed that the human rights movement has a direct interest in the success of anti-terrorism efforts.

”Yet, Washington’s tendency to ignore human rights in fighting terrorism is not only disturbing in its own right; it is dangerously counter-productive,” it added. ”The smouldering resentment it breeds risks generating terrorist recruits, puts off potential anti-terrorism allies, and weakens efforts to curb terrorist atrocities.”

The administration has compromised Washington’s long engagement and leadership on human rights in three major ways, according to the report.

First, in several key countries involved in the campaign against terrorism, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, ”even rhetorical support for human rights has been rare”, while Washington has been far less willing to confront other influential governments, such as Russia, China and Israel, that are using the ”war on terror” to hide or intensify their own repression aimed at minorities.

Second, the administration’s refusal to be bound by the human rights standards that it has preached to others, such as compliance with the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war, has conveyed the impression that rights and security are a zero-sum game, rather than mutually reinforcing. It has given rise to a ”copy-cat phenomenon”.

Third, Washington’s intense opposition to the enforcement of human rights law through such instruments as the ICC and the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture, as well as its aggressive pursuit of bilateral accords to exempt U.S. officials from the ICC’s jurisdiction, signals that Washington sees human rights standards as ”at best window-dressing”.

Such an attitude not only undermines international law itself, said HRW, it undermines the credibility of the United States as a proponent of human rights.

HRW said it had hoped that the European Union (EU) would step forcefully into the breach created by the administration’s assault on international human rights norms. ”But Europe’s leadership,” it said, ”was hampered by its own failure of political will, its undue deference to Washington, and the premium it puts on consensus at any cost”.

The report singled out the EU’s failure to table a resolution critical of China’s human rights record at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights last spring, and the speed with which European governments, particularly Britain’s, were willing to compromise with the United States on matters of principle regarding the ICC.

Several governments did step forward in 2002 to try to fill the leadership void, said the report, which praised Mexico, Canada, Norway, and Senegal in particular.

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