Human Rights Report Cites Troubling Trends

08 April 2011

Secretary Clinton met with members of civil society organizations during her visit to Yemen in January.

In releasing an annual report on human rights worldwide April 8, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that the struggle for basic human rights begins by telling the truth, over and over again.

Clinton told reporters during a special briefing that the annual report “represents a year of sustained truth telling by one of the largest organizations documenting human rights conditions in the world: the United States State Department.” The annual report — entitled Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2010 — is prepared for Congress.

This year’s report examines the legal status of human rights in more than 194 countries and territories around the world. Several troubling trends have been noted, Clinton said. The first is that of repressive governments restricting the ability of members of civil society to organize and operate.

According to the report, more than 90 governments, in the last several years, have sought to pass restrictive laws and regulations that would hamper the ability of organizations to register, operate freely or receive foreign funding. Nonetheless, there has been “explosive growth” of nongovernmental advocacy organizations around the world — even in countries where activists face great personal risk from repressive governments, the report says.

“Fifty years ago, when Amnesty International was created, few countries outside North America or Western Europe had any locally based human rights organizations,” the report says. “Today, local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) exist in almost every country in the world.”

“For countries to progress toward truly democratic governance, they need free and vibrant civil societies that can help governments understand and meet the needs of their people,” Clinton said at the press briefing.

Clinton has repeatedly emphasized the importance of civil society in building strong democracies and broad-based economic prosperity. “Societies move forward when the citizens that make up these groups are empowered to transform common interests into common actions that serve the common good,” she said in a major speech to the Community of Democracies last year. But when governments crack down on the right of citizens to work together, she said, “societies fall into stagnation and decay.”

Another troubling trend cited in the report on human rights in 2010 is the increasing number of repressive governments attempting to curtail access to the Internet and other new communications outlets.

“More than 40 governments are now using a combination of regulatory restrictions, technical controls on access to the Internet, and technologies designed to repress speech and infringe on the personal privacy of those who use these rapidly evolving technologies,” the report says.

Modern connective technologies, the report states, are important in gathering and sharing information on human rights with a broad audience. “Today there are more than two billion people with Internet access spread across most countries of the world, and around five billion mobile phone subscriptions. These numbers are projected to grow dramatically in the next 15 years,” the report says.

A third negative trend, according to the report, is the continuing escalation of violence, persecution and official and societal discrimination against members of vulnerable groups. These “vulnerable groups” include women, children, persons with disabilities, lesbians and gays, and members of racial, religious or ethnic minorities.

Exploitation of laborers was also a problem in many countries, often compounded by threats against workers for attempting to unionize.

The U.S. Department of State is required by law to provide Congress with a complete report regarding the status of internationally recognized human rights for countries that receive assistance and countries that are members of the United Nations. The report provides extensive information that often informs U.S. policymaking.

But the report is also an invaluable reference tool for other governments, international institutions, NGOs, human rights activists and journalists. The report is translated into more than 50 languages and made available online by the State Department.

“We hope that this report will give comfort to the activists, will shine a spotlight on the abuses and convince those in government that there are other and better ways,” Clinton said at the April 8 press briefing. “And we want to see progress.

“We started doing this report 35 years ago,” she said, “because we believed that progress is possible. And certainly, if you were to do a chart from 35 years ago to today, you would see a lot of progress in a lot of places. But at the same time, we must remain vigilant, and this report is one of the tools we use to be that way.”

To help with global understanding of the human rights issues, a new website is now available that consolidates human rights information from across all U.S. agencies.

Clinton announced HumanRights.gov (http://www.humanrights.gov/) on April 8 during the press briefing on the release of Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2010.

The purpose of the new website, she said, is to make it easier for people everywhere to access important information on human rights.

HumanRights.gov is “searchable and safe,” Clinton said — safe in that anyone can look at it and there is no need to register to use it. “We hope this will make it easier for citizens, scholars, NGOs to find the information they need to hold governments accountable,” she added.