Unsafe
World
By
Gideon Long
Reuters
29 May, 2003
LONDON - Washington's
"war on terror" has made the world more dangerous by curbing
human rights, undermining international law and shielding governments
from scrutiny, Amnesty International said on Wednesday.
Releasing its annual report into
global human rights abuses in 2002, the London-based watchdog made one
of its fiercest attacks yet on the policies pursued by the United States
and Britain in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
If the war on terror was
supposed to make the world safer, it has failed, and has given governments
an excuse to abuse human rights in the name of state security, it said.
"What would have been
unacceptable on September 10, 2001, is now becoming almost the norm,"
Amnesty's Secretary-General Irene Khan told a news conference, accusing
Washington of adopting "a new doctrine of human rights a la carte."
"The United States continues
to pick and choose which bits of its obligations under international
law it will use, and when it will use them," she said, highlighting
the detention without charge or trial of hundreds of prisoners in Afghanistan
and in a U.S. military camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"By putting these detainees
into a legal black hole, the U.S. administration appeared to continue
to support a world where arbitrary unchallengeable detention becomes
acceptable."
Amnesty urged the world to
do more to sort out Iraq's problems now the Gulf War is over.
"There is a very real
risk that Iraq will go the way of Afghanistan if no genuine effort is
made to heed the call of the Iraqi people for law and order and full
respect of human rights," Khan said.
"Afghanistan does not
present a record of which the international community can be proud."
Amnesty's 311-page report
was not concerned solely with the crises triggered by the attacks of
September 11.
It said the intense media
focus on Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002 meant human rights abuses in Ivory
Coast, Colombia, Burundi, Chechnya and Nepal had gone largely unnoticed.
Amnesty said the human rights
situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo remained "bleak,
with continuing fighting and attacks on civilians."
"In Burundi, government
forces carried out extrajudicial killings, 'disappearances', torture
and other serious violations," it said.
Amnesty said the Colombian
government had "exacerbated the spiraling cycle of political violence"
by introducing new security measures.
It accused Israel of committing
war crimes in the occupied territories and the Palestinians of committing
crimes against humanity by targeting civilians in suicide bombings.
"At least 1,000 Palestinians
were killed by the Israeli army (in 2002), most of them unlawfully,"
it said. "Palestinian armed groups killed more than 420 Israelis,
at least 265 of them civilians..."
Khan said it was vital that
the world "resist the manipulation of fear and challenge the narrow
focus of the security agenda."
"The definition of security
must be broadened to encompass the security of people, as well as states,"
she said.