Four years after the September 11th attacks in the United States, human rights are in retreat worldwide and the United States bears most responsibility, Amnesty International said today.
From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe the picture is bleak. Governments are increasingly rolling back the rule of law, taking their cue from the US-led "war on terror", it said.
"The USA as the unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power sets the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide," Secretary General Irene Khan said in the foreword to Amnesty International's 2005 annual report.
A detainee is escorted to interrogation by US military guards at Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba
"When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity," she said.
Amnesty cited the pictures last year of abuse of detainees at Iraq's US-run Abu Ghraib prison, which it said were never adequately investigated, and the detention without trial of "enemy combatants" at the US naval base in Cuba.
"The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law," Ms Khan said.
She also noted Washington's attempts to circumvent its own ban on the use of torture. "The US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Convention and to 're-define' torture," she said, citing the secret detention of suspects and the practice of handing some over to countries where torture was not outlawed.
US President George W. Bush often said his country was founded on and dedicated to the cause of human dignity - but there was a gulf between rhetoric and reality, Amnesty found.
"During his first term in office, the USA proved to be far from the global human rights champion it proclaimed itself to be," the report said, citing Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
But the United States was by no means the sole or even the worst offender as murder, mayhem and abuse of women and children spread to the four corners of the globe, the human rights watchdog said.
"The human rights abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan were far from being the only negative repercussions of the response to the terrible events of September 11th, 2001.
Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan
"Since that day, the framework of international human rights standards has been attacked and undermined by both governments and armed groups," the report said.
The increasingly blurred distinction between the war on terror and the war on drugs prompted governments across Latin America to use troops to tackle crimes traditionally handled by police, the report said.
In Asia too, the war on terror was blamed for increasing state repression, adding to the woes of societies already worn down by poverty, discrimination against minorities, a string of low-intensity conflicts and politicisation of aid, it added.
Africa too remained riven by regional wars and political repression, and the abject failure of the international community to take concerted action to end the slaughter in Sudan's vast Darfur region was a cause of shame.
Ms Khan also condemned the United Nations Commission on Human Rights for failing to stand up for those supposedly in its care.
"The UN Commission of Human Rights has become a forum for horse-trading on human rights," she said. "Last year the Commission dropped Iraq from scrutiny, could not agree on action on Chechnya, Nepal or Zimbabwe and was silent on Guantanamo Bay."