Study: Rights activists more oppressed since Sept. 11 Reuters
11 March 2002PARIS -- Governments around the world are using the fight against terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States to justify persecution and oppression of those who defend human rights, a report said Monday.
Civilians standing up for human rights are increasingly viewed with suspicion and discredited by some governments which equate their causes with those of terrorists, the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders said.
"The international fight against terrorism is used by certain states to legitimize their own policy of neutralizing all forms of opposition and political challenge," the Observatory said in a statement accompanying its 2001 report.
It referred to the recent adoption in many countries of specific laws tightening security.
The Observatory, run by the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights League and Geneva's World Organization Against Torture, detailed 400 cases of citizens in over 80 countries persecuted for tackling the system.
"The defenders are ... hounded, harassed, arrested, even executed by the authorities or private groups," it said.
The Observatory highlighted individual cases and groups of people targeted around the world, including union members in Colombia, journalists in the Democratic Republic of Congo and ex-Soviet CIS countries and gay rights activists in India.
One of the cases it looked at was that of a Tunisian judge who wrote an open letter to President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali criticising the country's lack of judicial independence and was later removed from his post.
It also detailed heavy-handed tactics employed by the authorities in Sudan, where 15 human rights lawyers were harassed and arrested without charge last year, with some being tortured while held in horrific conditions.