January 29, 2015

Human rights violations ultimately fuel crises

located:	China, Egypt, Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria, Syria
editor:	Murat Suner

Human Rights Watch reviews human rights practices in more than 90 countries. Yesterday, it released its 656-page World Report 2015, its 25th edition.

In his introduction, Executive Director Kenneth Roth points out that governments “make a big mistake when they ignore human rights to counter serious security challenges. Rather than treating human rights as a chafing restraint, policymakers worldwide would do better to recognize them as moral guides offering a path out of crisis and chaos.”

Because human rights violations “played a major role in spawning or aggravating many of today’s crises,” Roth said, and actually “protecting human rights and ensuring democratic accountability are key to resolving them.”

Civilians in Iraq and Syria have been extremely suffering from the rise of the extremist group Islamic State (IS), but IS did not emerge out of nowhere: The US invasion of Iraq, the security vacuum left thereafter, the sectarian and abusive policies of the Iraqi and Syrian governments as well as international indifference to them, have been important factors in fueling IS.

Human Rights Watch documented that in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have deliberately and viciously attacked “civilians in opposition-held areas. Their use of indiscriminate weapons – most notoriously, barrel bombs – has made life almost intolerable for civilians”. While the United States and its allies have allowed their military action against IS, there is no significant effort to push Damascus to end its abuses. According to HRW this “selective concern allows ISIS recruiters to portray themselves to potential supporters as the only force willing to stand up to Assad’s atrocities.”

However, the tendency to ignore human rights in the face of security challenges was a problem in the United States as well. While President Barack Obama has rejected torture by forces under his command, he has “refused to investigate, let alone prosecute, those who ordered the torture detailed in the Senate’s torture report, released last year.”

Hence, it is more likely that future presidents will treat torture as a policy option instead of a crime. This failure also greatly weakens the US government’s ability to press other countries to prosecute their own torturers, Human Rights Watch said.

According to Kenneth Roth, in too many countries, including Kenya, Egypt, and China, governments and security forces have responded to real or perceived terrorism threats with abusive policies that ultimately fuel crises.

To read the Human Rights Watch World Report 2015, please visit HRW World Report