Under the title “A Diminished Force for Good” Tom Parker of USA AI posted on 21 March 2012 a piece that – in a frank way – argues that the US should act with regard to its own human rights problems in order to regain international influence. It takes the lead role of the US in getting a resolution on Sri Lanka (successfully) passed in the Human Rights Council in Geneva this week and contrasts it with how the US has dealt with human rights abuses in its own ambit.
As Amnesty’s recent report Locked Away: Sri Lanka’s security detainees makes clear, human rights abuses still continue to this day in Sri Lanka. Instances of arbitrary and illegal detention have been widely reported, as have acts of torture and extrajudicial execution. Tom Parker says “I know from my own personal experience of working with Sri Lankan human rights defenders that the climate of fear in which opponents of the Rajapaksa regime operate is all-pervasive. The situation in Sri Lanka is grave and the intervention of the United Nations is much needed. .However, welcome though the US-sponsored resolution is, it is greatly undermined by the embarrassing gap that exists between US rhetoric and US behavior. Critics have not been slow in pointing this out.”…”The complete failure of the United States to address the deliberate use of torture as an integral part of the War on Terror hugely diminishes its ability to put pressure on other states to adhere to human rights standards that it itself has ignored. And we are all the poorer for it.”
for the full text see: A Diminished Force for Good.
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 