12 March 2008
Human Rights Report Supports Human Rights Activists, Rice Says
Evaluations highlight obstacles, but are written with “optimism”
Washington -- To some, the annual Human Rights Report is a gloomy list of human rights abuses committed by many governments around the world. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, however, sees it as a means to support human rights activists everywhere.
At a March 11 press conference marking the public release of the annual 2007 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, Rice said: “In every region of the world, men and women are working peacefully, and often at great risk to themselves and their families, to secure human rights and fundamental freedoms, to follow their consciences and speak their minds without fear, to choose those who would govern them and to hold their leaders accountable and to achieve equal justice under the law. …
“We gather today to support them, and it is our hope that this Human Rights Report will highlight the obstacles that still stand in their way, so that they may bear the mantle of justice at least at less risk to themselves and to their families.
“This document,” Rice said, “is collected and written with the optimism that no corner of the earth is permanently condemned to tyranny.”
In an interview with America.gov, Jonathan Farrar, the principal deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, said the goal of the report is “to make an accurate assessment of how other governments are living up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the standards within that.”
On December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Although the United States staunchly has supported human rights worldwide, the first U.S. Human Rights Report was released in 1977 and covered just 82 countries receiving U.S. aid. For 2007, the report covers 196 countries. This annual human rights report is submitted to the U.S. Congress by the Department of State in compliance with the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.
The U.S. human rights reports, Farrar said, have more than “30 years of integrity.” He added that the United States does not rank countries. Each report on individual countries considered stands on its own, he said.
NEW SECTION ON STATELESSNESS
This year’s report has added a new area of consideration: stateless populations.
“These are people who don’t hold nationality in any country,” Farrar said. “These are people such as Cambodians who fled Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge times, arrived in Vietnam, and now their children are not Vietnamese and they’re not Cambodians.”
An estimated 15 million people worldwide fall into the “stateless” category, Farrar said.
This new subsection in the Human Rights Report examines whether a country has habitual residents not recognized as nationals under the laws of any state and whether the government effectively has implemented laws and policies to give these people an opportunity to gain nationality on a nondiscriminatory basis. The report also examines whether there is violence or discrimination against stateless persons in employment, education, housing, health services, marriage or birth registration, access to courts or property ownership.
USES FOR THE REPORT
Farrar said the Human Rights Report is used by the U.S. diplomatic community worldwide, the U.S. Congress and nongovernmental organizations everywhere. “It generates the most hits over the State Department Web site of any document,” he said.
Foreign governments pay a lot of attention to the report, he said, “particularly if the report cites them for not living up to international standards of human rights.”
“We tried again this year, as we did last year, to highlight the need to defend the defenders of human rights,” Farrar said, pointing to the secretary of state’s newly inaugurated Defenders of Human Rights awards.
Acknowledging that recognition by the U.S. government sometimes can jeopardize the safety of human rights activists, Farrar said naming names in the report of those detained by their governments sometimes can result in greater protection for those individuals.
Farrar, who has spent the bulk of his diplomatic career working in Latin America, said human rights activists with whom he has met have regarded such official visits as a sort of validation of their efforts. “It’s helpful to them; so I continue to do it,” he said.
“We do have to listen to them, and take our guidance from them,” he said of the human rights activists the United States supports.
See the full text of the 2007 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.
