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Dubai: Amnesty International has painted a gloomy picture of human rights in the Middle East in its annual report.
All regional governments - including the so-called only democratic state in the Middle East, Israel - are involved in what the report described as systematic and brutal violations of human rights.
The report stated that popular sentiments are often exploited for political expediency. "It is largely the 'threat' of Israel that the Syrian, and to a certain extent the Egyptian governments have used to justify their decades long states of emergency, while it is the 'threat' posed to Israel by its Arab neighbours that is used to justify Israel's militaristic policies and to secure its continuing Western support," the report stated. Despite talk of democracy, good governance and accountability, most power remains firmly in the grasp of small elites in Iran, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, the Gulf states and in Syria and all those governments are largely unaccountable to those they govern, according to the report.
In Saudi Arabia, war on terror was used by authorities to justify repressive measures against not only suspected terrorists, but also to stifle dissent. The government disclosed it had been detaining 9,000 people since 2003, 3,000 of them were in custody in July 2007.
Detained
In Egypt, members of the Muslim Brotherhood were sent before a military court by presidential order after a civilian court dismissed charges against some of them. Authorities were reported to hold 18,000 administrative detainees.
Israel held more than 800 Palestinians as administrative detainees, in addition to more than 8,000 other Palestinians.
US blasted
The United States is shirking its duty to provide the world with moral leadership, and China is letting its business interests trump human rights concerns in Myanmar and Sudan, a human rights group said yesterday.
Amnesty International's annual report on the state of the world's human rights accused the United States of failing to provide a moral compass for its international peers. This year it criticised the US for supporting President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan when he imposed a state of emergency, clamped down on the media and sacked judges.
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