Promoting Human Rights

Extract

All wars—and the current war on terrorism is no exception—provide serious tests for the rule of law. The demands of armed conflict, with its instantaneous decisions of life and death, do not lend themselves easily to legal constraint. It is thus not surprising that the United States, which has been outspoken historically on matters of human rights, would become less attentive to those concerns after coming under deadly attack. For Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other human rights organizations, the primary concern since September 11 has been to demonstrate that upholding fundamental rights, whether on the battlefields of Afghanistan or in the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, is not only consistent with fighting international terrorism, but is, in essence, what the war is all about. The unwillingness of the Bush administration to embrace this idea bodes ill for the protection of rights as the war on terrorism reaches across the globe.