| New York Times | - 3 hours ago |
BERLIN
- The advocacy group Human Rights Watch sharply criticized
international powers on Tuesday for the way they are dealing with the
civil war in Syria, saying that the desire to bring President Bashar al-Assad's government to the negotiating table ...
BERLIN
— The advocacy group Human Rights Watch sharply criticized
international powers on Tuesday for the way they are dealing with the
civil war in Syria, saying that the desire to bring President Bashar
al-Assad’s government to the negotiating table should not become a
pretext for failing to protect civilians caught in the conflict, which
has claimed more than 100,000 lives.
The group included the criticism in an annual accounting of human rights records around the world on Tuesday, the day before an international peace conference on the Syrian conflict was set to begin in Montreux, Switzerland.
Separately, a team of legal and forensic experts
commissioned by the government of Qatar said on Monday that thousands
of photographs showing scarred, emaciated corpses offered “direct
evidence” of mass torture by Syrian government forces.
Kenneth
Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, which has its
headquarters in New York, said the images were consistent with what his
organization had seen when it visited detention centers in Syria. The
photographs, provided to the Syrian opposition by a man who described
himself as a defector from Mr. Assad’s security forces, highlight the
importance of opening up Syrian detention facilities to international
inspection, he said.
Speaking
at a news conference in Berlin, Mr. Roth said that Western governments,
and especially the United States, had not spoken out strongly enough
about the violence for fear that it could endanger the peace talks.
“It
is essential that the mass atrocities being committed in Syria be a
parallel focus of any diplomatic effort,” Mr. Roth said. He called for
an end to the indiscriminate killing of civilians and an opening of
Syria’s borders for humanitarian aid. “We cannot afford to wait for the
distant prospect of a peace accord before the killing of 5,000 Syrians a
month comes to an end.”
In
addition to Syria, the group’s report also condemned what it called
“lip service” paid to democracy by the governments of Egypt and Myanmar.
Human
Rights Watch said that rest of the world had done too little to
intervene in Syria to protect civilians, in contrast with the efforts
mounted by France, the United States and the United Nations in African
countries like the Central African Republic South Sudan.
President
Obama’s record on national security issues was criticized in the
report, from the continued existence of the detention center in
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to what the group called the unlawful killing of
civilians through drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The
group also faulted the “virtually unchecked mass electronic
surveillance” that was revealed by documents released by Edward J.
Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor. While Human
Rights Watch praised Mr. Obama for appointing a panel to recommend
reforms, the group questioned whether the recommendations would
translate into concrete policy changes.
“His
speech did not address some of the fundamental problems with the
massive invasion of our privacy rights represented by the N.S.A.'s
surveillance,” Mr. Roth said, referring to the president’s speech last
week on the nation’s intelligence programs. “There is a complete failure
to recognize the privacy interests involved.”
The
report also expressed concern that other governments, including those
with poor rights records, could follow the American example in
surveillance, forcing “user data to stay within their own borders,
setting up the potential for increased Internet censorship.” In
addition, the group chided the United States for attempting to prosecute
Mr. Snowden under the Espionage Act, noting that the decision has
allowed Russia, which has offered temporary sanctuary to Mr. Snowden, to
“recast itself as a champion of privacy rights.”
President
Vladimir V. Putin’s decision to free activists from the punk band Pussy
Riot and the environmental group Greenpeace, as well as the Russian
dissident Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, were dismissed as attempts to avoid
international criticism ahead of the Winter Olympics that begin in Sochi
next month. “The effect was largely to highlight the arbitrariness” of
Mr. Putin’s government, the report said.
Egypt,
Myanmar and Thailand, as well as Ukraine — where mass street protests
turned violent again this week — were singled out as examples where
governments pledged to make democratic changes that never came to
fruition. Human Rights Watch praised the resulting widespread protests
as an indication that the public is not willing to be denied basic
freedoms.
Compromises
among political parties achieved in Tunisia were held up as an example
of how, despite a stalled economy and political polarization, a
consensus can be achieved in a young democracy that emerged from the
popular movements for change across the Arab world in 2011, known as the
Arab Spring.
Correction: January 21, 2014
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated Human Rights Watch’s complaint about international efforts to protect civilians in Syria, compared with those in South Sudan and the Central African Republic. The group’s report said the efforts in Syria were insufficient; it did not call for military intervention in Syria.
end quote from:
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated Human Rights Watch’s complaint about international efforts to protect civilians in Syria, compared with those in South Sudan and the Central African Republic. The group’s report said the efforts in Syria were insufficient; it did not call for military intervention in Syria.
end quote from:
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