The US is shirking its duty to provide the world with moral leadership, and China is letting its business interests trump human rights concerns in Myanmar and Sudan, a human rights group said yesterday.
Amnesty International’s annual report on the state of the world’s human rights accused the US of failing to provide a moral compass for its international peers, a long-standing complaint the London-based group has had against the North American superpower.
This year it criticized the US for supporting Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf when he imposed a state of emergency, clamped down on the media and sacked judges.
“As the world’s most powerful state, the USA sets the standard for government behavior globally,” the report said, complaining that the US “had distinguished itself in recent years through its defiance of international law.”
As in the past, the US detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, came in for criticism.
Irene Khan, Amnesty’s secretary-general, urged the new US president — due to be elected in November — to announce Guantanamo’s closure on Dec. 10, the 60th anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The US State Department had no immediate comment on the report, but it has previously complained that the group uses the US as “a convenient ideological punching bag.”
China, an emerging power, came in for a few punches, too.
The report said China had continued shipping weapons to Sudan in defiance of a UN arms embargo and trading with countries accused of rights abuses such as Myanmar and Zimbabwe.
It said that China’s suppressive media censorship remains in place and that the government continues to persecute human rights activists.
The report also accused China of expanding its “re-education through labor” program, which allows the government to arrest people and sentence them to manual labor without trial.
But Amnesty said it detected a shift in China’s position: Last year, the country persuaded the Sudanese government to allow UN peacekeepers into Darfur and pressured Myanmar to accept the visit of a UN special envoy.
Khan told The Associated Press that it was much easier to break human rights deadlocks when Western countries and China worked together.
“China has the leverage to work with certain governments,” she said ahead of the report’s launch.
But she added that China needed to use that leverage responsibly.
“China is clearly a global power ... With that comes global responsibility for human rights,” she said. “It needs to recognize that economic growth is not enough.”
A woman who answered the phone at the Foreign Ministry in Beijing said that the ministry would look into the report. She refused to comment further or to give her name or position.
China has rejected previous such reports. It says that its human rights record has improved in recent years.
Amnesty International’s annual checklist of human rights outrages showed that people are still tortured or ill-treated in at least 81 countries.
Men and women also face unfair trials in at least 54 countries and are denied free speech in at least 77, it said.
The report also highlighted an increase in mass demonstrations by people around the world to demand action against poverty.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of