LONDON, 26 May 2005 — Four years after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, human rights are in retreat worldwide and the United States bears most responsibility, Amnesty International said yesterday, calling Guantanamo prison “the gulag of our times.”
From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe the picture is bleak. Governments are increasingly rolling back the rule of law, taking their cue from the US-led war on terror, the London-based human rights group said. “The USA as the unrivaled political, military and economic hyper-power sets the tone for governmental behavior worldwide,” Secretary-General Irene Khan said in the foreword to Amnesty International’s 2005 annual report.
“When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a license to others to commit abuse with impunity,” she added.
The report cited the pictures last year of abuse of detainees at Iraq’s US-run Abu Ghraib prison, which it said were never adequately investigated, and the detention without trial of “enemy combatants” at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law,” Khan said. In Washington, the White House said the report was “ridiculous and unsupported by facts.”
“The United States is leading the way when it comes to protecting human rights and promoting human dignity. We have liberated 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have worked to advance freedom and democracy in the world ...,” said spokesman Scott McClellan. And while US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did not address the Amnesty report he said in response to questions after a speech to the World Affairs Council yesterday: “It (Abu Ghraib) clearly damaged the US image in the world.”
Accused at a news conference of being too harsh on the United States, Khan replied that the facts spoke for themselves. Hundreds of people were being held in Guantanamo and the US airbase at Bagram in Afghanistan — some for more than three years — without either charge or trial and no access to legal representation. “By actively undermining human rights the United States, the European Union and others have actually made the security situation worse,” she said.
The European Union is guilty of “double-speak” on human rights, pressing the issue with certain countries but setting it aside when economic interests are at stake, Khan charged. Khan also slammed the EU for maintaining a “deafening silence” over reported rights violations by the United States. But the US was by no means the sole or even the worst offender as murder, mayhem and abuse of women and children spread to the four corners of the globe, Khan said.
The increasingly blurred distinction between the war on terror and the war on drugs prompted governments across Latin America to use troops to tackle crimes traditionally handled by police, the report said.
In Asia too, the war on terror was blamed for increasing state repression, adding to the woes of societies already worn down by poverty, it added. Africa too remained riven by regional wars and political repression.
