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28 May 2003 11:40:34
GMT
| (Updates after news conference)
By Gideon Long
LONDON, May 28 (Reuters) - 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
spiralling 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.
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