Washington's "war on terror" has made the world more dangerous by curbing human rights, undermining international law and shielding governments from scrutiny, Amnesty International said today.
Releasing its annual report into global human rights abuses in 2002, the London-based watchdog made one of its fiercest attacks yet on the policies pursued by the United States and Britain in response to the attacks of September 11th, 2001.
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If the war on terror was supposed to make the world safer, it has failed, and has given governments an excuse to abuse human rights in the name of state security, it said.
"What would have been unacceptable on September 10, 2001, is now becoming almost the norm," Amnesty's Secretary-General Ms Irene Khan told a news conference, accusing Washington of adopting "a new doctrine of human rights a la carte".
"The United States continues to pick and choose which bits of its obligations under international law it will use, and when it will use them," she said, highlighting the detention without charge or trial of hundreds of prisoners in Afghanistan and in a US military camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
More than six hundred Afghan prisoners continue to be incarcerated without representation or trial in Guantanamo Bay.
"By putting these detainees into a legal black hole, the US administration appeared to continue to support a world where arbitrary unchallengeable detention becomes acceptable." Amnesty urged the world to do more to sort out Iraq's problems now the Gulf War is over. "There is a very real risk that Iraq will go the way of Afghanistan if no genuine effort is made to heed the call of the Iraqi people for law and order and full respect of human rights," Ms Khan said. "Afghanistan does not present a record of which the international community can be proud." She added.
Amnesty launched its 311-page report simultaneously in 50 locations around the world, and was not concerned solely with the crises triggered by the attacks of September 11.
It said the intense media focus on Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002 meant human rights abuses in Ivory Coast, Colombia, Burundi, Chechnya and Nepal had gone largely unnoticed.
It also condemned the situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories where the death toll in 2002 more than doubled the number in 2001.
The organisation said while the situation attracted much international attention, it nonetheless received the least attention by the international community.
Amnesty also cited varying rights abuses across the globe including extra judicial killings, "disappearances", torture and other serious violations, while armed groups unlawfully killed maimed, abducted and tortured civilians in pursuit of their political aims. Additional reporting:
