The United Nations’ Counter-Terrorism Committee should affirm that protecting human rights is essential to the fight against terrorism, Human Rights Watch said today in an open letter to the committee’s chair. The U.N. body today opened a regional meeting in Almaty, Kazakhstan, with participating states from Central Eurasia.
“The Almaty meeting gives the Counter-Terrorism Committee a critical opportunity to show its leadership by calling on states in the region to bring the fight against terrorism in line with human rights,” said Rachel Denber, acting Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “This U.N. committee should reaffirm that violating human rights is wrong and counterproductive in combating terrorism.
Human Rights Watch’s letter focused on Russia and Uzbekistan, both countries that have endured horrific acts of terrorism in recent years. And in both countries, the government’s egregious human rights violations have undermined effective counterterrorism strategies.
The Uzbek government uses the threat of terrorism to criminalize as “fundamentalist” peaceful religious beliefs and practices that fall outside of state controls. The government has subjected thousands of religious Muslims accused of religious extremism—as well as terrorism suspects—to unfair trials and systematic torture or ill-treatment. The result has been unreliable convictions and a serious erosion of the rule of law in Uzbekistan.
The Russian government treats the ongoing conflict in Chechnya as a counterterrorism campaign. While it faces a genuine danger of terrorism, the government has itself committed atrocities such as murders of civilians, forced disappearances, the use of indiscriminate force, incommunicado detention, and torture and ill-treatment of prisoners—all in the name of the war on terror. Moscow has resisted the call to bring perpetrators of human rights abuse to justice, thus further alienating and marginalizing the Chechen population.
In late September 2001, in response to the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1373, which established the Counter-Terrorism Committee to monitor the resolution’s implementation and increase the capacity of states to fight terrorism.
