Headlines, Human Rights, North America

RIGHTS-U.S.: Groups Decry Hypocrisy in State Department Reports

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Mar 31 2003 (IPS) - U.S. rights groups praised the content of the State Department’s annual human rights country reports released Monday but questioned whether they will have any effect on Washington’s policy toward abusive countries – or even its own security forces active in the ”war on terrorism”.

”As the scale and intensity of the war on terror increases, the distance between the words in this report and the actions of the U.S. government is greater than it has been in more than a decade,” said William Schulz, the executive director of the U.S. section of Amnesty International (AIUSA).

"Despite the generally honest and factual character of the report, it is reduced in value by being set adrift from this administration’s development of foreign policy,” he said, adding that the policies toward countries deemed abusive by the reports remain ”often selective, inconsistent and damaging to human rights”.

That point was echoed by the Washington office director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), Tom Malinowski, who praised what he called ”very strong, hard-hitting chapters” on China and even U.S. allies in Central Asia and the Middle East.

”It pulls no punches on Egypt, for example, and indeed the human rights situation in Egypt has gotten considerably worse since the start of the Iraq war,” he said. ”The question is, is this all we’re going to hear from the administration on human rights in Egypt this year, or is the administration willing to confront Egypt on human rights issues more directly”?

Malinowski also noted that the reports repeatedly identified the use of so-called ”stress and duress” interrogation techniques – including sleep deprivation and forcing detainees to sit or stand in painful or contorted positions for long periods of time – in various countries as ”torture”, consistent with the findings of the United Nations Committee Against Torture.

”These are all techniques that some U.S. officials have said are being used by U.S. interrogators against al-Qaeda prisoners in Afghanistan and elsewhere,” he noted. ”The administration needs to address that inconsistency.”

The latest edition of the human rights reports, which were first mandated by Congress in 1976, covers the human rights situation – mainly political and civil rights and the right to be free from torture – in almost 200 countries in 2002 and stretches well over 1,200 pages in length.

The country reports constitute the world’s single most comprehensive analysis of human rights conditions and depend in major part on information collected by international and local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as well as on local newspapers and reporting by U.S. diplomats.

Many foreign governments resent the country reports, saying they illustrate U.S. arrogance toward the rest of the world. Some also argue that by failing to assess economic and social rights performance the analyses show an ideological blind spot.

While the country reports avoid comparing the human rights practices of different states, the introduction to the overall document, written by the assistant secretary of state for human rights, democracy and labour, often singles out specific nations for praise or blame.

In this year’s introduction, Assistant Secretary Lorne Craner depicted a mixed record for 2002, citing as highlights Kenya’s election of an opposition party, important institutional and political reforms in Taiwan, Turkey, and Bahrain, cease-fires or peace accords in long-running civil wars in Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, and Angola, and the establishment of a government in Afghanistan that included women and ethnic minorities.

On the negative side of the ledger, the introduction accused Zimbabwe’s government of waging a ”systematic campaign of violence and intimidation against stated and perceived supporters of the opposition”; a general worsening in the human rights performance of the five former Soviet Central Asian republics; the intensification of civil war in Nepal; continued abuses by both sides in Chechnya; ongoing civil unrest in Cote d’Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); a worsening human rights situation in Eritrea; and sectarian violence in India’s Gujarat State.

As in the past, the report also singled out Iraq and North Korea as among those countries with the worst abuses, including killings and torture of suspected dissidents.

It also again singled out China for criticism, noting a spate of arrests of political dissidents and the imposition of the death sentence on two Tibetans, among other developments that it called ”particularly troubling”. But at the same time it praised Beijing for direct elections of local officials in several provinces, advances in legal reform, and for opening itself to greater scrutiny by U.N. human rights rapporteurs.

Craner told reporters that Washington has not decided whether to sponsor, as it has in the past, a resolution criticising Beijing at the current meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva. ”We’ve seen a lot of slippage (in the rights situation) in the last couple of months” that makes it unclear in which direction China is headed, he added.

Several omissions in the introduction were particularly striking. For the first time in several years, it failed to mention the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an omission made all the more glaring by the fact that the death toll increased markedly last year. But the actual report blames both sides for the violence.

It also did not explicitly mention the war on terrorism, a major theme of last year’s introduction, which stressed that the administration would try to prevent its anti-terrorist campaign from being used by other governments to justify abuses. ”It’s a rather conspicuous omission,” according to Malinowski.

Elisa Massimino, Washington office director for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, also noted the omission, in contrast to previous years, of any discussion about torture, due process and the right to a fair public trial. ”The idea of leaving out issues that are so central to the war on terrorism raises questions about the administration’s willingness to address issues that cut too close to home.”

Malinowski said the report’s criticisms of U.S. Central Asian allies Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan were ”very strong”, particularly because current U.S. law ties the delivery of bilateral aid to both countries to making progress on human rights.