The administration of US President Joe Biden has expressed its regret at the "continuous decline" in the human rights situation around the world, at a time when it affirms that it has placed human rights at the center of its foreign policy.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said - during a press conference yesterday, Tuesday, during which he presented his ministry's annual report on the situation of human rights in the world - that "for many years we have witnessed an alarming deterioration of democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights in many parts of the world."
"Since we published our previous report" a year ago, "this decline has unfortunately continued," he added.
Blinken considered that the situation in Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian invasion of this country is the "most blatant evidence" of the "humanitarian consequences of this deterioration" in the human rights situation, and once again accused the Russian forces of committing "large-scale atrocities" in the areas they occupied.
The US Secretary mentioned in particular, "the corpses of people left in the streets with their hands tied, theaters, train stations and buildings turned into rubble over the heads of civilians (...), the testimonies of women and girls who have been raped, and civilians trapped and dying of hunger and cold."
In its report, the US State Department highlighted human rights violations in the anti-American countries, accusing China again of committing a "genocide" against Uyghur Muslims, and stressed that the Taliban had doubled the "arbitrary arrests of activists, demonstrators and journalists" since it seized power. In Afghanistan last August.
But the report also documented human rights violations in partner countries of the United States, such as Egypt, which was blamed, especially on the imprisonment of lawyer and human rights defender Mohammed Al-Baqer, and Ethiopia, where he said that “all the combatants” had “committed atrocities,” noting also that “thousands of Ethiopians are detained.” unjustly in life-threatening circumstances.
Blinken rejected criticism from human rights organizations that express their regret that the Biden administration did not exert enough pressure on certain countries that are allies of the United States.
The minister stressed that "whether it is a friendly country or a country with which we have real differences, our unit of measurement is the same" because human rights are "universal".