The US State Department’s “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices-2007” is an exercise in hypocrisy. The report labels countries like Cuba, Syria, Iran and Zimbabwe – countries that have refused to toe Washington’s line – as “the world’s most systematic violators of human rights” even as it ignores the gross violation of human rights by the US and its allies.

Washington’s closest friends in the Middle East – Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt – get away with a mere rap on the knuckles, although their record on human rights is abysmal. While admitting that India “generally respected the rights of its citizens”, the report draws attention to custodial killings, disappearances, and torture and rape by police and other security forces. It points to the government’s use of special anti-terrorism legislation to justify the excessive use of force while combating terrorism and insurgencies. 

The report makes special mention of the violence at Nandigram. India has rightly protested the US finger pointing as it amounts to interference in the country’s domestic affairs.

What makes the US report particularly objectionable is the selective blindness that grips Washington’s observations. The US’ own record at home and abroad goes by uncommented in the report. With regard to the human rights situation in Iraq – Amnesty International has described the situation here as “disastrous” – the US report blames all except its own forces for the violations there.

The report makes no mention of the US-run detention camps in Iraq, where Iraqi nationals are routinely subjected to extreme torture and abuse. The US, incidentally, refuses UN officials access to these detention centres, claiming that these are not subject to international human rights law because of the ongoing armed conflict in Iraq. The Guantanamo Bay detention centre, notorious for its torture of prisoners, which the US continues to operate despite international demands for its shutting down, too finds no mention in the report.

The violation of human rights whether by the state or non-state actors, by democratic or dictatorial regimes, by rich or poor countries should be condemned and tackled. But a selective approach is unlikely to achieve success.

Rights are being violated with impunity by governments across the world in the name of fighting ‘terror’. The US report sweeps under the carpet the Bush Administration’s human rights violations in the name of the “war on terrorism”. The US will have to clean up its blood-drenched record before it hauls up others for violating rights.