By Evelyn Leopold
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Globalization has created undeniable wealth and millions of jobs but the current system leaves little room for human rights and other social values, Human Rights Watch said in a report on Thursday.
"International human rights standards exist but are not uniformly ratified, effectively enforced or adequately integrated into the global economy," the New York-based group said in its 11th annual report.
The report argues that respect for human rights and democracy is good for business, noting that Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate economist, had promoted this theory for years.
Abuse of human rights, such as freedom of assembly or a voice in running the country, impedes economic development as unaccountable governments are more likely to indulge in corruption or ignore signs of an oncoming famine.
Saying the debate had become unnecessarily polarized, the 540-page report on the state of human rights said social values did not result automatically from an increase in the flow of international capital, information and people.
China's booming international trade, for example, had not muted the government's determination to snuff out political opposition. And in Sudan, oil revenues made possible by foreign investment, allowed the government to double its military budget within two years for a "highly abusive" civil war.
In Sierra Leone and Angola, international trade in diamond, albeit illicit, has fueled deadly civil wars. And the number of migrant workers and trafficking victims has grown with international commerce, the report said.
Yet, the report notes that critics of free trade have few defenders in poor nations, where fears are mounting that linking global commerce to human rights will end up serving protectionist interests in the industrial world only.
Human Rights Watch recommends a series of reforms in international institutions but said none of them was a panacea. One proposal was for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to promote the creation of national bodies to enforce human rights as part of a loan package.
The United Nations, which has the expertise, has no power and too few resources to enforce human and social rights. And the World Trade Organization, which has enforcement powers shies away from doing so and has no "expertise, culture or tradition of protecting rights," the report said.
Chechnya Response A "Glaring Failure"
In its survey of 70 countries, the report said Russia's war in the breakaway province of Chechnya was conducted with "gross disregard" for the suffering of civilians. And one of the "glaring failures" in 2000 was the failure to even threaten Moscow with penalties if it did not control its troops.
The military in Colombia was singled out for not severing links to paramilitary groups responsible for grave human rights abuses. Israel was rebuked for using excessive force against the Palestinians and Indonesia was faulted for not reigning in militia responsible for scorched earth tactics in East Timor and now intimidating refugees in West Timor.
In the United States, the report said the criminal justice system still suffered from too much policy brutality, "racial disparities in incarceration, abusive conditions of confinement and state-sponsored executions, even of juvenile offenders and the mentally handicapped."
For many of the unchecked atrocities in the world, Human Rights Watch blamed the lack of support given to the United Nations. The world body, it said, was used as "a dumping ground" for global problems without the capacity or resources to address them.
Rich countries, especially, the United States did not provide the United Nations with enough resources to do its job, while developing nations viewed an expansion of staff to handle crises as a diversion of resources from projects they cherished.
Governments must stop diverting the world body from pressing problems "with demands for unread reports delivered to forgotten committees," the report said.
Despite superb efforts by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth said "the United Nations uses a lot of high-flown rhetoric on human rights, but it doesn't have the wherewithal to really protect victims."
"The Security Council must stop treating human rights as an unwelcome irrelevancy best left in its Geneva exile," Roth said in reference to the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Commission.:
