BRITAIN: Washington's war on terror has made the world more dangerous by curbing human rights, undermining international law and shielding governments from scrutiny, according to Amnesty International.
The London-based watchdog made one of its fiercest attacks yet on the policies pursued by the US and Britain in response to the attacks of September 11th, 2001 in its annual report into global human rights abuses in 2002.
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 10th, 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 à 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.
"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's 311-page report 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 accused Israel of committing war crimes in the occupied territories and the Palestinians of committing crimes against humanity by targeting civilians in suicide bombings. - (Reuters)