The human rights movement can look back on 2009 with some satisfaction in exposing abuses almost anywhere in the world. By shaming, diplomatic and economic pressures, the human rights movement is making it more costly for abusive governments to violate fundamental human rights, according to Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

However, in reaction to these successes, the most repressive governments are “counterattacking” and devising strategies that target human rights defenders themselves, and weaken the movement, said Roth at a news conference Jan. 19.

Roth announced the release of this year’s HRW 612-page annual World Report 2010,which summarizes HRW’s work in over 90 countries and territories during 2009.

Kenneth Roth is the executive director of Human Rights Watch.

“In some cases, human rights activists—be they advocates, journalists, lawyers, petition-gathers, or others who document and publicize abuses or defend victims—have been harassed, detained, and sometimes killed,” says the introduction to the report.

Their methods have developed in 2009 to include murders of human rights defenders that the repressive government can deny involvement. Additionally, human rights activists are being prosecuted under the guise of common criminal charges. Laws regulating NGOs that appear neutral are used to harass and disband human rights organizations. Sometimes funding is blocked by disallowing foreign contributions, effectively putting a human rights organization out of commission.

When abusive governments use violence or the threat of violence coupled with arrests of human rights defenders, it doesn’t help their reputation any. So, they look for other, more subtle ways to control and limit human rights activists. The three most common techniques employed that are described and illustrated in the HRW report are (1) Stifling NGOs, (2) Disbarring lawyers, and (3) Bringing criminal charges on human rights defenders.

Ethiopia passed a NGO law in Jan. 2009 that “essentially shut down most human rights monitoring,” says Roth. Any organization that advocates for human rights (including children’s rights) or good governance cannot receive more than 10 percent of its funding from abroad. Since Ethiopia doesn’t have, relatively speaking, many domestic donors, this law has, in effect, curtailed NGOs work in sensitive areas.

While Ethiopia is an extreme case some  countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Uganda, Turkmenistan, and Libya use laws to restrict NGOs, which the governments want to stifle and dissolve. Inventing phony criminal charges against human rights defenders has been used by many abusive rulers such as Ethiopia’s to halt their work and make them pay a heavy price for their activism.

The Ethiopia’s  rulers use the vague charges, “harms national security or attempt genocide ” and accusing activists of being “foreign agents or terrorist group members,” to arrest  activists and opposition leaders ,” and to sentence them to prison.

Ethiopia’s rulers have mastered how to use criminal libel lawsuits as a tool to silence human rights activists, opposition leaders and their supporters. For example, the Birtukan Midekssa, a lawyer and a Chairwomen for Unity for Democracy and Justice (UDJ) has been sentenced by Meles Zenawi’s court to life in prison for exercising her basic first amendments right.

Source: http://beforeitsnews.com/