Human Rights Watch: Call for Prosecutions in Abu Grhaib, Dafur

[Jack Rabbit]

From Human Rights Watch
Dateline Washington, DC, Thursday January 13

Abu Ghraib, Darfur: Call for Prosecutions
Human Rights Watch’s 2005 Report Covers 60-Plus Countries

The worldwide system for protecting human rights was significantly weakened in 2004 by the crisis in Darfur and the Abu Ghraib scandal, Human Rights Watch said in releasing its annual world survey today.

While the two threats are not equivalent, the vitality of global human rights depends on a firm response to each—on stopping the Sudanese government’s slaughter in Darfur and on fully investigating and prosecuting all those responsible for torture and mistreatment in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo.

“The U.S. government is less and less able to push for justice abroad, because it’s unwilling to see justice done at home,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch urged the Bush administration to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate any U.S. officials who participated in, ordered or had command responsibility for torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Human Rights Watch pointed out that senior administration officials have sought to blame the scandal on the young soldiers they sent to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of accepting responsibility themselves for the policies and orders that weakened the rules against torture and inhumane treatment.

Read more.

[eleonora]

1. this, my friend, is a pearl of wisdom

"“The U.S. government is less and less able to push for justice abroad, because it’s unwilling to see justice done at home,”

[Jack Rabbit]

2. HWR World Report 2005

For the report online, please click here.

The language used concerning the Bush junta's network of offshore gulags is unusally blunt:

The Bush administration continues to reject the applicability of fundamental rights protections found in U.S. and international law to persons apprehended in its global campaign against terrorism. It refuses to apply either laws of war or human rights standards to the more than five hundred men at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who have been held, many since 2002, in long-term indefinite and largely incommunicado detention; it has begun proceedings to try terrorist suspects before military commissions that do not meet fair trial standards; it has sought to block the most basic due process protections to U.S. citizens detained on presidential order as enemy combatants; and it has sent or assisted in the return of individuals to countries where they face torture.