April 22, 2016

U.S. warns of ‘accelerating’ rights abuses worldwide

More

The U.S. State Department says in a new report that the world faces a “global governance crisis” as both governments and non-state actors increasingly infringe on human rights.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in the State Department’s human rights report, released on April 13, that Washington saw “an accelerating trend by both state and non-state actors to close the space for civil society, to stifle media and Internet freedom, to marginalize opposition voices and, in the most extreme cases, to kill people or drive them from their homes.”

Mr. Kerry also denounced governments for cracking down on freedom of expression by “jailing reporters for writing critical stories” or targeting non-governmental organizations (NGOs) “for promoting supposedly ‘foreign ideologies’ such as universal human rights.”

Mr. Kerry said non-state actors like Islamic State militants and Boko Haram in 2015 committed “crimes against humanity,” including genocide. He said such groups “flourish in the absence of credible and effective state institutions.”

In its annual human rights report, the U.S. State Department says that “authoritarian governments” are reacting against an increasingly strong “civil society” throughout the world “because they fear public scrutiny and feel threatened by people coming together in ways they cannot control.”

“In 2015, this global crackdown by authoritarian states on civil society deepened, silencing independent voices, impoverishing political discourse and closing avenues for peaceful change,” the report says.

The report accuses governments across the former Soviet Union of both overt repression of political freedoms and bureaucratic measures aimed at stifling opposing voices.

Russia’s repression

It criticizes the Kremlin for “a range of measures to suppress dissent,” including “new repressive laws” and selective prosecution “to harass, discredit, prosecute, imprison, detain, fine and suppress individuals and organizations engaged in activities critical of the government.”

The report also accuses Russia of “especially” targeting individuals and organizations that have opposed the Kremlin’s forceful and illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region and Moscow’s support for separatists who are fighting Kyiv’s forces in eastern Ukraine.

Russian authorities controlling Crimea, the report adds, have subjected Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars on the peninsula to “systematic harassment and discrimination.”

Moscow has repeatedly rejected such accusations by Western governments in the past and typically responds angrily to criticism it faces in the U.S. State Department’s human rights report.

The report says citizens of Belarus continued to face human rights violations in 2015, including an inability to “change their government through elections,” restrictions targeting former “political prisoners,” and a failure to account for long-standing cases of politically motivated disappearances.”

Copyright 2016, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington DC 20036; www.rferl.org (see http://www.rferl.org/content/us-report-accelerating-rights-abuses-worldwide/27673237.html).

Comments are closed.