There has been a rise in attacks against organisations that document government abuse, according to Human Rights Watch. The New York-based watchdog singled out Sudan and China for particular criticism in an annual report that makes bleak reading.

The 612-page document is HRW’s 20th review of the state of human rights worldwide and looks at the situation in more than 90 countries and territories. Governments that systematically violate human rights are stepping up their campaigns against people who try to defend them, according to the investigators who compiled the research.

Reed Brody, the European spokesman for Human Rights Watch, said:

“Last year was characterised really by heightened attacks on human rights defenders and organisations and institutions that protect human rights and there were a lot of horrible situations last year from Guinea and Congo, to repressive governments like Eritrea and North Korea.”

Reasons to be cheerful
Despite admitting Human Rights Watch has struggled to carry out its work in many places, Reed Brody points to a number of reasons to be positive, including the arrest of former Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic and the trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor at the International Criminal Court in the Hague:

“Democracy is taking root in many more countries, almost all of Latin America is democratic. Civil society is organised to an extent that it never has been so human rights is progressing, but the bad guys, the abusers and the bullies, are fighting back.”

The report doesn’t rank countries according to how bad they are but does highlight a number of regimes so abusive that it’s impossible for any domestic human rights organisations to operate in there. Reed Brody also criticised government crackdowns on minorities - like that in the Xin Xiang region of China.

The Obama factor
The inauguration of President Barack Obama in the US has made it possible for Washington to set a better example, but the White House still has a long way to go if it wants to prove it is serious about stopping human rights violations:

“The failure to look back and put in protections for the future, the failure to repudiate the criminal practises of disappearance and torture by actually investigating who might be responsible, and prosecuting the architects of that policy weakens the US’ stated turnaround. If it’s not willing to prosecute this kind of widespread brutality in prison and the use of tactics that are widely considered to be torture, it weakens the commitment to turn the page.”