WASHINGTON, March 6 (UPI) -- Sudan has the worst abuse of human rights, according to the U.S. State Department Tuesday.
In its annual report on human rights worldwide, the United States said the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed militia killed civilians and systematically tortured people.
"Almost 60 years after the adoption of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- an expression of the outraged conscience of mankind to the enormity of the Holocaust and the cataclysm of the Second World War -- genocide continued to ravage the Darfur region of Sudan," the department said.
In addition, it pointed out that freedom was beginning to erode in Afghanistan and Iraq, adding that in Iraq, "both deepening sectarian violence and acts of terrorism seriously undercut human rights and democratic progress in 2006."
It also mentioned the coups in Fiji and Thailand that brought down democratically elected governments last year, as well as the increase in detaining and arresting political activists by the Chinese government.
Responding to the latest report, Amnesty International's U.S. executive director Larry Cox said that "if the Bush administration persists in allowing other considerations to trump human rights concerns, the real-world impact of these reports will be greatly diminished."
He added that "until the United States changes its own policies of holding detainees indefinitely, in secret prisons and without basic rights, it cannot credibly be viewed as a world human rights leader. Human rights abuses must not be hidden behind a facade of national security rhetoric."
