US: The US government has thumbed its nose at human rights and has granted a licence to others to commit abuse with "impunity and audacity", Amnesty International's 2005 report claims.
Irene Khan, Amnesty International secretary general, writes in the report that the US had set the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide because it was the unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power.
"From Israel to Uzbekistan, Egypt to Nepal, governments have openly defied human rights and international humanitarian law in the name of national security and 'counter-terrorism', she said in a foreword to the Amnesty report, released yesterday.
The report is an A-Z compendium of human rights abuses in more than 160 countries around the world.
The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay had become "the gulag of our times" while the UN Commission on Human Rights had become a "forum for horse-trading on human rights", Ms Khan said.
At the Irish launch of the Amnesty report, Dr Kathleen Cavanaugh of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the University of Galway said there had been "an abject failure on the part of all governments" to protect human rights.
"We have seen an attempt at legitimising pre-emptive strikes. We have seen an attempt at reformulating torture ... In short what we are seeing is a virtual unpicking and rewriting of international human rights law."
The Amnesty report found that US-led forces had committed "gross human rights violations" in Iraq including killings, arbitrary detention and torture.
It highlighted Darfur in Sudan as a clear example of how the rest of the world had failed to intervene. Schoolchildren were gang raped, detainees were tortured, villages were devastated and herds and possessions were looted. "Despite clear international awareness of the abuses being committed in Darfur, a long list of governments knowingly or unwittingly allowed arms to be sent to the country that were then used by the Sudanese government forces and allied militias to commit atrocities."
The report found that there was no effective response to the systematic rape of tens of thousands of women and girls in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Haiti, people responsible for serious human rights violations were allowed to regain positions of power.
"Despite compelling evidence that Zimbabwe would continue to experience food shortages, the government terminated most international food programmes," the report said.
The Zimbabwean police, army and government supporters were implicated in "numerous human rights violations including torture, assault and arbitrary detention". In China, the report found that thousands of people were sentenced to death or executed, many after unfair trials. The "global war on terror" was being used to justify a crackdown on the Uighur community in Xinjiang.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, anti-government forces killed civilians involved in the electoral process while lawlessness and insecurity increased.
Jim Loughran, campaigns manager of Amnesty's Irish section, said it was a "sad reflection on human rights" that Amnesty still had to go through the yearly ritual of producing the compendium of human rights abuses.
"Instead of moving on to promote a new agenda challenging poverty, the right to healthcare and a decent standard of living, we find ourselves once again having to challenge the use of torture," he said.
