AFR and AP http://afr.com.au/content/991210/update/update70.html December 10, 1999 Rights group highlights abuses, but has praise for 1999 Police brutality in the United States, torture in Sierra Leone and civilian massacres in Colombia have been highlighted in an annual survey of human rights abuses in 68 countries around the world. But the report, issued today from Human Rights Watch, also hailed a new willingness by world governments to stop such atrocities from occurring as well as new international efforts to prosecute those responsible for carrying them out. "The most striking development of the last year was the decline of sovereignty as an obstacle to international action in the face of crimes against humanity," Kenneth Roth, executive director of the organisation told a press conference. "Governmental leaders faced a much greater chance of prosecution for these crimes, and in two cases - East Timor and Kosovo - the international community was actually willing to deploy troops, or peacekeepers, to stop these crimes in action," he said. Human Rights Watch applauded the indictment in May of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic by the UN war crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia as the first international attempt to prosecute a sitting head of state. It also welcomed the efforts by a Spanish magistrate to prosecute General Augusto Pinochet in connection with human rights abuses committed during his 1973-90 dictatorship in Chile - the first international prosecution of a former head of state. The New York-based organisation held out particular praise for the precedent established in the deployment of a peacekeeping force to East Timor. The Indonesian-occupied territory voted for independence August 30 and then degenerated into chaos when anti-independence militias went on a killing rampage to protest the results. In a September 10 statement, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned Indonesia's leaders that they risked prosecution if they didn't stop the killings or allow other countries to do so. Human Rights Watch said the pronouncement merited being called the 'Annan Doctrine' - since it compelled the Indonesian government to consent to an international peacekeeping force that quelled the violence and enabled the United Nations to put the territory on the road to independence. The arrival of peacekeeping troops in Kosovo was also welcomed by Human Rights Watch because they helped end the atrocities committed by Serbs against the province's ethnic Albanians. However, the 516-page report criticised the NATO campaign in Yugoslavia, citing imprecise aerial bombing that didn't stop the killings and pointing out that only after weeks of bombardment did it succeed in forcing Milosevic to accept an international force in the province. The group cautioned that the campaign itself violated several humanitarian norms since civilian targets such as heating and electrical plants were bombed. It warned against the potential misuse of military intervention, which it said could be used for ulterior motives. Efforts to create the world's first permanent criminal court, meanwhile, gained 'impressive' momentum with 90 countries signing the treaty and six of the required 60 ratifying it, the group said. Elsewhere around the world, however, the human rights picture was gloomier. The United States was criticised for two widely publicised incidents of police brutality in New York that Human Rights Watch said were the latest examples of a 'plague' of unjustified shootings, severe beatings, fatal chokings and unnecessarily rough treatment by police that occur around the country. In Africa, Sierra Leone's cease-fire brought an eight-year civil war to a close but included an amnesty for rebels, who are blamed for killing, maiming, raping and torturing thousands of people, Human Rights Watch said. Roth faulted the international community for essentially compelling the government to accept the amnesty because it refused to further fund the West African intervention force fighting the rebels. In Asia, Human Rights watch applauded UN demands that any tribunal to prosecute Khmer Rouge leaders have a strong international component. In Latin America, democracies remained stable over 1999, although rights abuses took place throughout and 'nowhere more brutally than in Colombia,' where paramilitary groups working with open support of the armed forces continued to massacre civilians, it said. 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