The U.S. State Department's 2006 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, released today in a briefing with Secretary Rice, includes a new section that underscores the U.S. commitment to defending human rights defenders. This begs the question: What has the U.S. commitment to defending human rights looked like in Iraq?
Unfortunately, it has so far fallen short of what it ought to be. For example, funding for human rights documentation has been traditionally restricted to looking at past abuses under Saddam's regime.
The truth is that there are a lot of civil society organizations in Iraq, including human rights groups, that are doing important work despite the violence. While there are tremendous risks involved in working in particular areas of Iraq, there are still Iraqis on-the-ground taking those risks everyday. Our government needs to not only pay lip service to defending these incredible people, but strengthen its commitments with due funding and appropriate action.
More to come on this.
No comments:
Post a Comment
The Ground Truth Blog is a forum for those who care about the plight of innocent Iraqis. All opinions expressed in this blog are those of the EPIC community, and not necessarily those of the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC). We embrace the democratic spirit of civil discourse, but reserve the right to remove any content that we find to be unacceptable, including anything that: (1) abuses, harasses, or threatens a person or persons; (2) knowingly falsifies information or defames or misrepresents another person; (3) Violates any obligation of confidentiality; (4) Violates the privacy of any third party; (5) Contains editorial content that has been commissioned and paid for by a third party and/or contains paid advertising links and/or SPAM; (6) infringes upon any copyright, trademark, trade secret or patent of any third party (all quotes and excerpts must be properly attributed to the original author). For details on fair use, see the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Legal Guide for Bloggers).