May 25, 2005, The US abdicated its responsibility to set a global example in upholding human rights in 2004 and, with the UK, led a “dangerous new agenda” by sanctioning torture in a failed attempt to combat terrorism, Amnesty International warned today.

Speaking at the launch of Amnesty’s annual report into human rights abuses, the group’s secretary general, Irene Khan, said governments worldwide had betrayed their promises on human rights last year.

She singled out as bleak examples international inaction on the killings in Darfur, the UN’s failure to deal with abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the torture of prisoners by the US military in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The US came in for particular criticism over its pronouncements on torture and for “usurping the language of justice and freedom to pursue policies of fear and insecurity”, she told a London press conference.

“The USA, as the unrivalled political, military and economic hyperpower, sets the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide,” she said. “When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity.”

She said practices such as the detention without trial of more than 500 men at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba undermined US moral authority and had damaged the Bush administration’s ability to put pressure on other countries for progress on human rights.

“The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law,” she said. ” Guantanamo evokes memories of Soviet repression.”

Ms Khan likened the Bush administration’s practice of holding unregistered prisoners, or “ghost detainees”, at secret locations to tactics deployed in some Latin American countries.

The US government’s use of dubious terms such as environmental manipulations, stress positions and sensory manipulation to describe the treatment of prisoners amounted to “cynical attempts to redefine and sanitise torture”, she said. She also criticised what she said was the UK’s acceptance of intelligence derived by torture in certain circumstances.

“To say in a 21st-century democracy that torture is acceptable is to push us back to medieval ages,” she warned.

Against this backdrop, armed groups had continued to make shocking attacks on civilians, Amnesty reported. These included the murder of hundreds of parents and children in Beslan, the massacre of commuters in Madrid and the beheadings and bombings in Iraq. Yet governments had persisted with failed, but politically convenient, strategies on tacking terrorism, Ms Khan said. “Four years after 9/11, the promise to make the world a safer place remains hollow.”

With tens of thousands of people killed and more than 2 million displaced by the violence in Darfur in western Sudan, Ms Khan called on African leaders to stand firm on human rights, accusing the African Union of failing the people of Zimbabwe.

“African leaders do a disservice to their own people when they use African solidarity as a cover for impunity rather than a call for accountability,” Ms Khan said.

The director of Amnesty’s Africa programme, Kolawole Olaniyan, added that the failure to protect women and children in Congo, as well as sham elections in Togo, had highlighted weaknesses in the African Union. Apathy, indifference and the international community’s failure to keep its promises had only added to Africa’s human rights problems, he said.

Ms Khan defended Amnesty against accusations that the report had focused unduly on human rights abuses by the US, saying the accusations were backed up by facts. We are not doing this to pursue an anti-American agenda,” she said. “We are pointing out to the US the role it can play to create a positive role model.”

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