WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken stated on Tuesday that governments world wide, together with in Russia and China, grew extra repressive final yr, because the State Department launched its annual report on international human rights.
The division’s 2021 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices echoes President Biden’s warnings that authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. Its introduction cites “continued democratic backsliding on several continents, and creeping authoritarianism that threatens both human rights and democracy — most notably, at present, with Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine.”
The report covers the previous yr and thus doesn’t embrace particulars about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. But it singled out Russia’s authorities as a main rights abuser, citing reviews of extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, bodily abuse of suspects by police and different offenses, together with frequent impunity for accused safety officers.
Among the traits Mr. Blinken highlighted was the more and more brazen manner governments had been “reaching across borders to threaten and attack critics.” He described a plot to kidnap a journalist in New York that prosecutors stated was orchestrated by an intelligence community in Iran, and the Belarusian authorities’s resolution to drive a Ryanair passenger flight to land in order that safety forces may arrest a journalist on board.
Some governments had been additionally fast to lock up critics at house, Mr. Blinken stated, itemizing Cuba, Egypt and Russia. More than a million political prisoners are being held in 65 nations, the report discovered.
China’s authorities “continues to commit genocide and crimes against humanity” in opposition to ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang and has cracked down on primary freedoms in Hong Kong, Mr. Blinken stated.
One nation that noticed a critical flip for the more serious was Afghanistan, whose U.S.-backed authorities collapsed after Mr. Biden withdrew American forces from the nation in August. Mr. Blinken described “a serious erosion of human rights,” together with arbitrary detentions of ladies, protesters and journalists; reprisals in opposition to the previous authorities’s safety forces; and restrictions on the liberty of ladies and ladies to work and examine.
One constructive signal amid the grim panorama, Mr. Blinken stated, was the profitable U.S.-led effort final week to droop Russia from the United Nations Human Rights Council.
“A country that’s perpetrating gross and systemic violations of human rights shouldn’t sit on a body whose job it is to protect those rights,” he stated.
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