WASHINGTON - The impunity surrounding the ethnic cleansing in Darfur, Sudan and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in U.S.-occupied Iraq has dealt a serious blow to global efforts to strengthen respect for human rights, according to a major U.S. human rights group.
”No one would equate the two,” according to a lengthy introduction to the 527-page survey of 60 countries by Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), ”yet each, in its own way, has had an insidious effect.”
”One involves indifference in the face of the worst imaginable atrocities, the other is emblematic of a powerful government flouting a most basic prohibition,” he wrote. ”One presents a crisis that threatens many lives, the other a case of exceptionalism that threatens the most fundamental rules.”
”The vitality of the global defense of human rights depends on a firm response to each,” he went on, urging serious efforts by the U.N. or any competent group of nations to stop the Sudanese government's slaughter in Darfur and to condemn the policy decisions by the Bush administration that resulted in torture and mistreatment of Iraqi and other detainees and to punish those responsible.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0113-11.htm------------------------------------------------------
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