Human Rights Violations Around the World

Human Rights Violations Around the World

Recently the ex-Army chief of Sri Lanka created a wave by saying that many Tamil separatists were gunned down by the Army when they were ready to surrender. If this is true then there is a gross violation of human rights. According to General Sarath Fonseka, Gotabhaya Rajapakse, the Defence Secretary—the brother of the current President—instructed soldiers not to take in rebel prisoners. Sri Lankan authorities have resisted international calls for a war crimes investigation amid allegations by the United Nations that more than 7000 civilians were killed during the first four months of last year alone. The military claimed victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) after wiping out the leadership of the once-powerful movement, which began its armed struggle for an independent Tamil homeland in 1972. Similarly, human right violations in Somalia and other parts of the world are quite rampant.

According to the Human Rights Organisation in the US, there is widespread human rights abuse practised in India. This reveals the double-standards on the policy of human rights at the international level. Two examples are sufficient to prove that such a body, like other international organisations, works under the instructions of the Western countries. The first news came from Afghanistan and Iraq. It has been proved that the US military had crossed all limits of atrocities against the captives in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Obama Administration is set to intensify the torture debate by releasing scores of new pictures showing abuse of prisoners held by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. The pictures were taken between 2001 and 2006 at the detention centres. The Bush Administration had repeatedly blocked through legal channels appeals from human rights groups for release of the pictures, which are held by the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. But the Obama Administration lifted all legal obstacles and the pictures are to be published shortly.

The second news came from Britain. Australian PM Kevin Rudd has apologized to hundreds of thousands of people, some of them British migrants, who were abused or neglected in state care as children. Government records show that at least 150,000 children aged between three and 14 were taken abroad, mainly to Australia and Canada, in a programme that began in the 1920s and did not stop until 1967. The children, almost invariably from deprived backgrounds and already in some form of social or charitable care, were cut off from their families or even falsely informed that they were orphans. While their parents were told the child migrants had gone for a better life, in many cases they remained in institutions or were sent to farming families and treated as unpaid labour, and many faced abuse. A key subtext to the programme, particularly in relation to Australia, was the aim of supplying the Commonwealth countries with sufficient “White stock”. Obviously this brings out the racist policies of the Western countries.

More about human rights violations around the world.