GOVERNMENTS AROUND the world have focused their efforts on overcoming the global recession with the promotion of human rights “relegated to the back seat”, Amnesty International has said.
Speaking at the launch of Amnesty's annual report – The State of the World's Human Rights– the organisation's secretary general Irene Khan said the world needed "to defuse the human rights time bomb".
“Rising poverty and desperate economic and social conditions could lead to political instability and mass violence,” she wrote in the report.
A “new deal” on human rights was now needed. That “global deal” should be about governments living up to their obligations on human rights rather than creating new treaties.
“We are sitting on a powder keg of inequality, injustice and insecurity and it is about to explode.”
She said the worst global downturn in decades had plunged large parts of the world into recession, leading to very significant downturns in trade and industrial output. Many people had been left without work.
There had been tough responses in many countries to protests against economic hardship and rising food prices. Protesters had been killed in Tunisia and Cameroon. The massive numbers of people now out of work had left “disillusioned, angry young men idle in their home villages and easy prey to extremist politics and violence”.
Ms Khan said the recession had also led to an increase in xenophobia with 56 people killed in South Africa last year during attacks on immigrants.
While one billion people experienced malnutrition, food shortages had been compounded by governments who used food distribution as a tool of oppression and political manipulation.
In Zimbabwe some five million people needed food aid every day and the government used this as a weapon against its political opponents. In North Korea, the deliberate restriction of food was used by the regime to oppress people.
Amnesty has said some government’s efforts to fight the recession had seen them neglect dealing with conflicts that had led to serious human rights abuses.
Such conflicts included those in Gaza, Sudan’s Darfur region, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Afghanistan. Amnesty’s report includes overview chapters assessing human rights promotion and abuses in different regions of the world. The report also contains separate human rights assessments for 157 nations.
On the US, Amnesty welcomed moves by the president Barack Obama to close Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, where so-called “enemy combatants” are held.
However, indefinite military detention without trial was still continuing at the camp. Domestically, there were continued reports of police brutality and ill-treatment in US prisons and immigration facilities. There were 37 executions last year, the lowest for 15 years.
In China the Olympic Games had “heightened repression” as the authorities “tightened control” on human rights activities, ethnic minorities, religious practitioners, journalists and lawyers. The Chinese had detained 1,000 people at protests in Lhasa in March. Many remained in detention and others were unaccounted for. Torture, the restriction of information via the internet and the use of “re-education camps” all increased in the run-up to the Olympics.
In North Korea millions of people continued to face food shortages. Those who had fled into China in search of food and work were forcibly repatriated and subjected to forced labour and torture in prison camps. Independent human rights monitors continued to be denied access to North Korea.
In the UK there were “continued failures of accountability for past violations, including alleged state collusion in killings” in the North. Secrecy around anti-terrorism measures had led to “unfair judicial proceedings”.
