WASHINGTON—The human rights movement can look back on 2009 with some satisfaction in exposing abuses almost anywhere in the world. By shaming, diplomatic and economic pressures, the human rights movement is making it more costly for abusive governments to violate fundamental human rights, according to Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).
However, in reaction to these successes, the most repressive governments are “counterattacking” and devising strategies that target human rights defenders themselves, and weaken the movement, said Roth at a news conference Jan. 19.
Roth announced the release of this year’s HRW 612-page annual World Report 2010,
which summarizes HRW’s work in over 90 countries and territories during 2009.
“In some cases, human rights activists—be they advocates, journalists, lawyers, petition-gathers, or others who document and publicize abuses or defend victims—have been harassed, detained, and sometimes killed,” says the introduction to the report.
Their methods have developed in 2009 to include murders of human rights defenders that the repressive government can deny involvement. Additionally, human rights activists are being prosecuted under the guise of common criminal charges. Laws regulating NGOs that appear neutral are used to harass and disband human rights organizations. Sometimes funding is blocked by disallowing foreign contributions, effectively putting a human rights organization out of commission.
“Russia stood out this year by the number of human rights activists murdered,” said Roth. Many of these victims were reporting on arbitrary detentions, torture and executions in Chechnya, such as Natalia Estemirova, who was abducted and murdered. These acts are “not done overtly by [Russian] government agents,” but “always unidentified assailants,” said Roth. And the government does not make an effort to find and prosecute those responsible.
In addition to Russia, the governments of Kenya, Burundi, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Malaysia, Uzbekistan, and even India were guilty of allowing or encouraging violent attacks on human rights defenders. In Afghanistan, for example, authorities have made “little or no effort” to find the murder(s) of Sitara Achakzai, a “prominent” human rights activist from Kandahar, who “complained for weeks about threats that she had been receiving,” a commonplace concern of many Afghan women in public life. Government officials did nothing to protect her, according to Roth.
Closed societies
There are some governments which are so tightly controlled that a domestic human rights organization cannot even exist and inspections from international human rights monitors are not allowed in. Eritrea, North Korea, and Turkmenistan fit this description. When lacking ‘civil society,’ it is “impossible for human rights activists to do their work openly,” Roth said at the news conference.
Other abusive governments are virtually closed, Roth said. “Embattled human rights movements” face off against hostile governments in Burma and Iran, but do just barely exist; both nations bar international monitors.
“Saudi Arabia does not acknowledge non-government human rights promotion,” says the report. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi rejects the concept of an independent civil society, effectively baring domestic human rights monitoring. Syria apparently rejects the concept as well, by not licensing any of its human rights groups.
“The Cuban government refuses to recognize the legitimacy of any independent human rights organization,” says the report. Virtually all forms of dissent are criminalized, and human rights defenders face beatings and imprisonment. Another communist country, Vietnam, similarly bans independent human rights organizations, which the Communist Party says are “subversive.” Last year, in June, police arrested Le Cong Dinh, a lawyer defending democracy and religious freedom activists, and charged him with “distorting Vietnam’s constitution and laws.”
Threats of violence in order to discourage or harm human rights defenders are cited in the report in the nations of Columbia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sri Lanka and Nicaragua.
Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe have prevented outside inspectors from investigating. Indonesia and Israel, in 2009, kept human rights activists and journalists out in troubled areas, where armed conflict had taken place.
More subtle methods to silence human rights defenders
Russia led the way with a controversial law regulating NGOs in 2006. Human rights organizations that monitor government corruption are confronted with high fees and close government oversight in the form of audits and inspections, which if not met, lead to their closure. These administrative harassments are designed to prevent these NGOs from doing their work, said Roth.
Ethiopia passed a NGO law in Jan. 2009 that “essentially shut down most human rights monitoring,” says Roth. Any organization that advocates for human rights (including children’s rights) or good governance cannot receive more than 10 percent of its funding from abroad. Since Ethiopia doesn’t have, relatively speaking, many domestic donors, this law has, in effect, curtailed NGOs work in sensitive areas.
While Ethiopia and Russia are the extreme cases, many other countries use laws to restrict NGOs, which the governments want to stifle and dissolve. Such laws are being used in Egypt, Jordan, Uganda, Turkmenistan, and Libya.
Lawyers who defend human rights victims have themselves become objects of attack in three countries cited by Roth. Last year, China and Iran disbarred lawyers to prevent them from playing an effective role in defending human rights. Syrian human rights attorney Muhannad al-Hasani was permanently disbarred for “weakening national sentiment,” says Roth.
Inventing phony criminal charges against human rights defenders has been used by many abusive governments to halt their work and make them pay a heavy price for their activism. Chinese authorities were able to shut down, in July 2009, “China’s foremost independent legal aid organization, the Open Constitution Initiative,” and arrest its founder Xu Zhiyong on suspicion of “tax evasion,” says the report.
Another human rights activist, Huang Qi, was sentenced to three years in prison for “possession of state secrets.” Huang had exposed the shoddy construction that caused the collapse of schools in the Sichuan earthquake on May 2008.
The Iranian government used the vague charges, “harms national security” and accusing activists of being “foreign agents,” to arrest “scores of NGO activists,” and sentenced them to prison. Kurdish rights leaders in Iran have also faced trumped-up charges and even heavier sentences, including the death penalty.
Criminal libel lawsuits are still another tool to silence human rights activists. For example, in Morocco, the president of a leading human rights organization was sentenced to three years when his criticism of officials allegedly involved in drug-trafficking was deemed to be a “grave offence” to state institutions. The report cites other examples of how libel laws are exploited in Chechnya, Serbia, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka.
Other topics in the HRW 2010 annual report
The report discusses attacks on human rights institutions, in particular, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague and UN Human Rights Council. Institutions like these are important because victims of injustice who are unable to be heard at the national level may secure justice at the international level. For this reason, abusive governments have begun to attack the international system of justice for threatening their impunity to carry out human rights offenses, Roth said.
At the press conference and in the introduction, Roth expressed his disappointment in the stance of the African Union which “vowed not to cooperate with the ICC effort to arrest [Sudanese] President Omar al-Bashir.” The latter is charged for crimes committed against civilian populations in Darfur.
Roth found much to criticize of the UN Human Rights Council which he is said is “fixated on Israel and ignores many other situations worthy of consideration.” Far more serious concerns go unheeded. For example, in May 2009, the government of Sri Lanka was responsible for the deaths of several thousand civilians, and interned 300,000 civilians after the fighting ended with the Tamil Tigers, according to Roth. The Council mostly ignored the rights violations while focusing only on abuses committed by the Tigers.
The abusive governments have cleverly headed off scrutiny of their own human rights abuses by becoming influential leaders in the Council, out-maneuvering the democracies, and minimizing the impact of the testimony of independent NGOs, according to the report.
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