U.S. Has Lost Credibility On Rights, Group Asserts
By Nora Boustany
Washington Post
The advocacy group Human Rights Watch said yesterday that Washington's once-powerful role as a prime defender of human rights had effectively ended because of arbitrary detentions and reports of torture since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the group urged the European Union to step up as a leader of the cause.
Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, released the group's World Report 2007, an assessment of last year's global human rights practices, by saying that the counterterrorism record of the United States over the past five years has tarnished its credibility as an influential moral voice.
He listed several practices he said were being used by the Bush administration in its fight against terrorism, including torture, arbitrary detentions, allowing CIA interrogators to use coercive techniques and the unsupervised handling of so-called enemy combatants held in other countries.
"This catastrophic path has left the United States effectively incapable of defending some of the most basic rights," Roth said in the report, released on the fifth anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Roth said Sudan, where the people of the western Darfur region are subject to mass murder, rape and forcible displacement, finds it easier to resist an international protection force because of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
"The trend is bleak, but not irreversible," Roth wrote in an introduction to the report, saying it was up to the new Democratic-led Congress to repudiate past abuses, press for policy change and seek accountability.
(There is more.)
Washington Post
The advocacy group Human Rights Watch said yesterday that Washington's once-powerful role as a prime defender of human rights had effectively ended because of arbitrary detentions and reports of torture since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the group urged the European Union to step up as a leader of the cause.
Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, released the group's World Report 2007, an assessment of last year's global human rights practices, by saying that the counterterrorism record of the United States over the past five years has tarnished its credibility as an influential moral voice.
He listed several practices he said were being used by the Bush administration in its fight against terrorism, including torture, arbitrary detentions, allowing CIA interrogators to use coercive techniques and the unsupervised handling of so-called enemy combatants held in other countries.
"This catastrophic path has left the United States effectively incapable of defending some of the most basic rights," Roth said in the report, released on the fifth anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Roth said Sudan, where the people of the western Darfur region are subject to mass murder, rape and forcible displacement, finds it easier to resist an international protection force because of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
"The trend is bleak, but not irreversible," Roth wrote in an introduction to the report, saying it was up to the new Democratic-led Congress to repudiate past abuses, press for policy change and seek accountability.
(There is more.)
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