‘We’re watching you!’
Clinton warns world nations
By David Brooks
From the Mexican newspaper La Jornada
NEW YORK – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week, as she released her department’s annual report on human rights, that the document makes it clear to the 199 countries and territories on it that Washington is watching them and will hold them accountable.
To citizens and activists everywhere, the United States says: “You’re not alone; we are standing with you.”
Clinton called 2011 “an especially tumultuous and momentous year for everyone involved in the cause of human rights.” She said that “many of the events that have dominated recent headlines, from the revolutions in the Middle East to reforms in Burma, began with human rights, with the clear call of men and women demanding their universal rights.”
“We are supporting efforts around the world to give people a voice in their societies, a stake in their economies,” she said, “and to support them as they determine for themselves the future of their own lives and the contributions they can make to the future of their countries.”
This annual exercise in which the government of the United States issues its report on the human rights situation worldwide – with little or no self-criticism and apparently mindless that it assumes the role of world judge without being asked to – says that when human rights are violated or threatened by the authorities, the frequent result is political conflict and instability.
Michael H. Posner, Assistant Secretary for Human Rights, writes in the introduction to the document – 2011 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices – that “citizen uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa have sent aftershocks rumbling around the world [with] millions of citizens in many other countries express[ing] their dissatisfaction with governments that fail to deliver results to their people.”
“Whether in grand movements or small acts, people in countries around the world are standing up and demanding their universal rights, dignity, greater economic opportunity, and participation in their countries’ political future,” Posner writes.
“Protecting human rights and fundamental freedoms ensures that negotiations over a country’s future can take place without fear or intimidation,” he says, “and that anti-democratic forces do not snuff out genuine political participation.”
“Where human rights are consistently abused or threatened, by authorities or by criminal, sectarian, or other undemocratic groups that enjoy impunity, the result is frequently political strife, economic contraction, and destabilization,” Posner says. In contrast, where human rights are respected, there is greater stability and security.
“Respect for human rights builds political stability and lays the foundations for democratization […] and enhanced global security,” the Assistant Secretary says. The major transitions that are taking place in various countries show “that the real choice is not between stability and security; it is between reform and unrest.”
Along with “hopeful developments,” Posner cites “a range of negative developments,” including growing restrictions on political and electoral freedom, a greater imposition of less democratic constitutional provisions, restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly – including on the Internet – and intimidation of the media.
He mentions the use of new technologies of information and communication to support and nourish democratic movements, but also mentions the use of the same technologies by regimes to spy upon and control those movements.
Latin America
The report highlights the cases of Mexico, Cuba, Honduras, Venezuela and Nicaragua. In the case of Mexico and Honduras it underlines the contexts of violence generated by organized crime and the problems linked with corruption by the influence of those criminal forces. But in the cases of the other three countries, as in all the previous reports, it emphasizes the political conditions promoted by regimes that are critical of, or counter to, the government of the United States – although that factor is not mentioned.
In the case of Cuba, it says that “the government continued its systemic repression of human rights and fundamental freedoms,” and “continued to organize mobs intended to intimidate opposition groups, particularly the Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White.)”
About Venezuela, the report says that “there was an accelerating concentration of power in the executive branch,” and that “the government also took actions to impede freedom of expression and criminalize dissent.”
Nicaragua is used as an example of countries that became less free. In that country, it says, “ extensive irregularities in the electoral process marked a setback to democracy and undermined the ability of Nicaraguans to hold their government accountable.”
The report can be found in: state.gov/j/drl/
Thus, the government of the country with the largest prison population, where in recent months we have seen a level of often violent repression by police at peaceful demonstrations by Occupy Wall Street, where national and international human rights organizations have criticized the impunity of those responsible for the torture and disappearances in the so-called war on terrorism, where the violation of the rights of immigrants and native communities is constant, where lawsuits are filed and complaints are made over the lack of official transparence and the suppression of freedom of the press, where the domestic espionage of citizens is widespread, where the right of free association and labor union rights are violated, where voting rights are not guaranteed and international law is flouted (in cases of the death penalty, political assassination abroad and the use of clandestine prisons), congratulates itself for offering this annual evaluation of human rights elsewhere in the world.
