Politicians
have shamelessly been peddling a “toxic rhetoric” that is creating a more
divided and dangerous world, said human rights group Amnesty International at the launch Tuesday of its annual report on rights around the world.
Speaking in
Paris, France, the organization’s Secretary General Salil Shetty warned that the
“politics of demonization” was threatening to unleash the “darkest aspects” of
human nature.
“Too many
politicians are answering legitimate economic and security fears with a
poisonous and divisive manipulation of identity politics in an attempt to win
votes,” Shetty told journalists.
He said the
dangerous idea that “some humans are lesser than others” was leading to a world
that is more fragmented and “less safe for all of us”.
The Amnesty
International report, titled The State of the World’s Human Rights, covers
159 countries and provides a wide-ranging international analysis of the human
rights situation.
The report
cautions that the consequences of the "us versus them" rhetoric setting the
agenda in Europe, the United States and elsewhere is “fuelling a global
pushback against human rights and leaving the global response to mass
atrocities perilously weak”.
While the
current U.S. president came in for criticism because of his “poisonous campaign
rhetoric” and actions since his inauguration, Shetty said that Donald Trump was
not the only one fostering the current climate of fear, blame and division.
“More and
more politicians are calling themselves anti-establishment and are wielding a
toxic agenda that hounds, scapegoats and dehumanizes entire groups of people,”
Shetty stressed.
According to
Amnesty International, many governments in 2016 turned a “blind eye to war
crimes, pushed through deals that undermine the right to claim asylum, passed
laws that violate free expression, incited murder of people simply because they
are accused of using drugs, justified torture and mass surveillance, and
extended draconian police powers”.
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| Salil Shetty |
The
organization chose to launch its report in France this year to highlight some
of these issues in a country where human rights are “tightly woven into the
fabric of the nation”, as Shetty put it.
Previous
reports have historically been introduced in London, where Amnesty is based,
but the group said it wished to draw attention to human rights abuses during
France’s continuing state of emergency. The latter is in response to a series
of terrorist attacks that have claimed the lives of more than 300 people since
January 2015 and injured hundreds of others in the country.
Amnesty and
other rights groups have criticized “heavy-handed” French security measures
that include thousands of house searches and detentions in the wake of the
attacks.
“We
understand that governments have to protect people but it has to be
proportionate,” said Shetty, speaking at the Paris launch venue located along
the river Seine - and overlooking a copy of the iconic statue of liberty that
France offered to the United States.
“The
emergency law is deeply discriminatory if you look at the people whose homes
have been searched,” he added. “It’s one religion that has been targeted.”
The report
also throws light on the treatment of refugees and migrants - “often an easy
target for scapegoating”. It records how
36 countries “violated international law by unlawfully sending refugees back to
a country where their rights were at risk”.
Amnesty said
that if the targeting of refugees continues in 2017, “others will be in the
cross-hairs”.
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| A demonstration in Paris last year in support of protecting civilians in Aleppo. (Photo: Brunaud / Picturetank) |
“The
reverberations will lead to more attacks on the basis of race, gender,
nationality and religion,” Shetty said.
Government crackdowns on free expression have equally targeted writers, journalists and artists in many countries, the report shows.
In response
to a question about accusations of bias on Amnesty’s part in its reporting of
violations, Shetty defended the organization and its record. “I take criticism
from some leaders as a plus point,” he said. (Critics include Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad and Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who have
respectively accused the organization of bias and naïveté.)
Shetty told
journalists that it was easy to imagine a “dystopian future where unrestrained
brutality becomes the new normal”, but he said that would only come to pass if
people allowed it.
“Where
leaders fail, people must step up,” he said. “Today we need that spirit more
than ever before.”
Meanwhile,
Camille Blanc, the head of Amnesty International’s French section, called on
French people to act on behalf of human rights, especially in light of coming
presidential elections where the extreme-right candidate Marine Le Pen is
leading in polls for the first of two rounds of voting.
"Citizens should not allow themselves to fall into the trap of politicians espousing hate and fear," Blanc said. "It's important to denounce ... but also to act."
