Rights 'trampled' by war on terror

Amnesty International accused Britain and the United States yesterday of using the 11 September terrorist attacks as an excuse to ride roughshod over human rights in the name of national security.

While deploring unconditionally the terror attacks, the human rights organisation accused countries as far apart as Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Australia of restricting civil liberties. It reserved some of its strongest condemnation for Britain and America.

Launching Amnesty's 2002 annual report in London yesterday, Irene Khan, its general secretary, said that such infringements were nothing new but that this time established democracies had taken the lead in "introducing draconian laws to restrict civil liberties in the name of public security".

Amnesty said that Britain and America had passed emergency laws allowing the detention without trial of foreign suspects.

Fears for national security and the drive to muster a coalition for the "war on terrorism" had led to hypocrisy in the observance of human rights, Ms Khan said. "Governments remained silent on abuses committed by those they counted or sought as allies."

The report said Britain had imposed laws that restricted people's rights to free assembly and a fair trial. And its Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act, passed in December, had allowed foreign nationals to be detained indefinitely without charge or trial. The report said that in approving such legislation Britain had derogated sections of the European Convention on Human Rights.

More than 1,200 people, mostly foreigners, had been arrested secretly in the United States since 11 September and their treatment aroused serious concern, the report said.The detainees at Guantanamo Bay were kept in a legal limbo in which they enjoyed neither prisoner-of-war status nor internationally recognised rights of criminal suspects.

Ms Khan said existing legislation was mostly adequate to defend national security. "If human rights are sacrificed in the search for peace and security, there will be no peace and no security," she said.