Marwaan Macan-Markar

South-east Asian regimes known for their human rights violations are receiving a reminder here of how close the US government is to marching in their step, including having the habit of detaining without trial people deemed to be national security threats.

On Friday, a senior US official appealed for more global understanding about a this legal practice, one that is among Washington’s cornerstones in its “war on terror” - although it appears to “fly in the face of a historically open legal process (in the United States)”. “I can only hope (that) over a longer period of time, those who question what we have done understand that it was done consistent with our Constitution,” US Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told a packed meeting at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand.

Ridge’s comments came just over a day after five British Muslims were released from the Guantanamo Bay prison, where the US government has incarcerated over 600 suspects in its ‘war on terror’ after the Sep. 11 attacks. To rights activists, this release in fact sheds light on just how far Washington is willing to go to sacrifice human rights in favour of national security. After all, it took the British police barely 24 hours to release the men without any charges.

This was in marked contrast to the ordeal they underwent at the hands of US authorities -- four of them were held in the Guantanamo Bay prison for two years without a hint of trial or adequate access to lawyers. Ridge’s efforts to justify this post-Sept. 11 arrest and detention practice by the US government was seen in some quarters here as an abdication of what the United States had long represented - an upholder of rights and a defender of laws.

“This has put a big question mark on the banner the US has been carrying as a global champion of human rights,” Sunai Phasuk, the Thai representative for the New York-based Human Rights Watch, told IPS. “Currently, the US is resorting to draconian practices which it strongly criticises when practised by other regimes.”

Ridge’s defence of the Guantanamo Bay detentions would have been warmly received by South-east Asian regimes that pursue extrajudicial policies, he added. An Asian diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity raised the issue of “double standards” in the US adherence to human rights.

Burma’s military government is among the regimes in the region that have been regularly filling its jails with people it considers a security threat. The police in Communist Party-ruled Laos, on the other hand, are known for arbitrarily arresting people.

Further, the Malaysian and Singaporean governments use their respective internal security acts to detain people without trial.

In fact, the US State Department’s annual ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices’ released in late February, captures this reality, criticising, for example, human rights violations in Burma, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. However, there was hardly a hint in Ridge’s speech that the current US government’s policy of detentions without fair trial constitutes a violation of human rights - though this practice is noted by the State Department when similar realities prevail in other Asian countries. — IPS