U.S. and China condemned in Amnesty report

LONDON -- The United States is shirking its duty to provide the world with moral leadership and China is letting its business interests trump human rights concerns in Myanmar and Sudan, a human rights group said Wednesday.

Amnesty International's annual report on the state of the world's human rights accused the U.S. of failing to provide a moral compass for its international peers, a long-standing complaint the London-based group has against the North American superpower.

This year it also criticized the U.S. for supporting Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf last November when he imposed a state of emergency, clamped down on the media and sacked judges.

"As the world's most powerful state, the USA sets the standard for government behavior globally," the report said. It charged that the U.S. "had distinguished itself in recent years through its defiance of international law."

As in the past, the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay came in for criticism. Irene Khan, Amnesty's secretary-general, appealed for the American president elected in November to announce the jail's closure on Dec. 10, 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey said the U.S. remains at the forefront of promoting human rights and has made extensive efforts to transfer detainees from Guantanamo Bay to their home countries, having done so in several hundred cases already.

But more than 100 countries have refused to take back certain detainees, Casey said.

"Many countries that we would want to transfer people back to, I think if you asked an organization like Amnesty International whether they want us to transfer them back to those countries, would have some serious concerns about that," he said.

Casey said there is no perfect solution, but said those who think closing Guantanamo Bay is the answer should work with the U.S. to resolve these problems.

Emerging power China was also criticized. The report said China had continued shipping weapons to Sudan in defiance of a U.N. arms embargo and traded with abusive governments such as Myanmar and Zimbabwe. It said that China's media censorship remains in place and that the government continues to persecute rights activists.

The report also accused China of expanding its "re-education through labor" program, which allows the government to arrest people and sentence them to a manual labor without trial.

But Amnesty said it detected a shift in China's position: In 2007, China persuaded the Sudanese government to allow U.N. peacekeepers into the Darfur region and pressured Myanmar to accept the visit of a U.N. special envoy.

Khan told The Associated Press that it was much easier to grapple with human rights problems when the West and China worked together.

"China has the leverage to work with certain governments," she said ahead of the report's release.

"China is clearly a global power. With that comes global responsibility for human rights," Khan said.