What a lousy time for human rights

[Zafir]

Amnesty International's 2006 report: What a

lousy time for human rights

 

 

Amnesty International, the worldwide, human-rights watchdog organization, has just issued its annual report summarizing human-rights conditions in 150 countries. In it, some of the usual suspects, like Cuba and Egypt (the second-largest recipient, after Israel, of U.S. foreign aid), come in for typical criticism for their silencing of journalists or suppression of political expression. But this year, the United States occupies a disturbingly, high-profile place in AI's catalog of abuses and injustices carried out by governments of all kinds around the world.

 

Amnesty International has just released its annual report about human-rights conditions around the world

 

The Bush administration's prison camp at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo, Cuba, "has become the gulag of our time," Amnesty International's secretary general Irene Khan said in presenting her organization's new report to the press. (Le Figaro) Her comparison of the Cuba facility to Soviet-era prison camps where opponents of Moscow's communist regimes were sent away to be silenced and treated harshly comes as the so-called war on terror has, AI argues, allowed torture and human-rights abuses to flourish, all in the name of what some politicians claim are the interests of national security.

 

AI's secretary general, Irene Khan, calls the U.S. prison camp in Cuba "the gulag of our time"

"Duplicity and doublespeak have become the hallmark of the war on terror," Khan noted, as evidence mounts "of widespread torture in U.S. detention centers" (allegedly run by the C.I.A) and the Bush administration "outsourc[ing] torture to countries like Morocco, Jordan and Syria." Khan pointed out, too, "that at least seven European countries had sanctioned or turned a blind eye to the use of their airspace for so-called extraordinary rendition flights carrying prisoners for interrogation outside the United States" to secret destinations where they were reportedly tortured. It is with practices like these, the senior AI official said, that "[p]owerful governments are playing a dangerous game with human rights."

 

Khan said: "[T]he war on terror has given a new lease of life to old-fashioned repression....These governments today do with much greater confidence what they used to do more quietly in the past".

 

The human-rights group's report looks at women's rights in Iran, too

As AI's report points out, "evidence continued to emerge of the torture and ill-treatment [by U.S. personnel] of detainees in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, before and after the abuses in Abu Ghraib prison [in Baghdad]," which had become known to the world in April 2004. At U.S.-run facilities, AI cites "interrogation techniques" that had been "officially approved... included the use of dogs to inspire fear, stress positions, exposure to extremes of heat or cold, sleep deprivation and isolation." And the human-rights organization notes that, in the U.S., there has been "continued failure to hold senior officials accountable for [such] abuses."

 

 

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