Amnesty Report

The BBC summarise a new Amnesty International report:

The document - Amnesty International Report 2007 - is the group's annual assessment of human rights country-by-country.

"The politics of fear are fuelling a downward spiral of human rights abuses in which no right is sacrosanct and no person safe," Amnesty International's Secretary General Irene Khan said ahead of the launch of the report...

"The 'war on terror' and the war in Iraq, with their catalogue of human rights abuses, have created deep divisions that cast a shadow on international relations," she said...

It also criticises the US government for what it said were kidnappings, arbitrary detention, tortures and secrets transfers of terror suspects - the practice known as "extraordinary rendition".

Widespread human rights abuses in Afghanistan, Belarus, China, Iran, Russia, Syria, Vietnam and Zimbabwe are also mentioned in the report.

As an afterthought, presumably. Mind you, they (the BBC, that is) miss out on some of the juicier items in the report:

Prime Minister John Howard finds himself alongside Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe in an Amnesty International report which says they are among short-sighted fear-mongers dividing the world.

Amnesty secretary-general Irene Khan says the fear generated by leaders such as Mr Howard thrives on myopic and cowardly leadership.

Ms Khan included Mr Howard with Mr Mugabe, US President George Bush and Sudan's President Omar Al-Bashir in the same scathing paragraph in her foreword to the group's annual report published today.

Comments

[William McIlhagga]

Amnesty's supporters detest & loathe GW Bush. Therefore Amnesty must detest and loathe GW Bush, or else its supporters will desert it and it will cease to exist.

The problem is that this strategy makes Amnesty far less objective than it ever was. It now cannot be trusted, and is sinking into irrelevance. Which is a shame, really.