The United States today denounced what it said was the growing use of security forces by repressive regimes to crackdown on a worldwide groundswell of pro-democracy protests.
"The fundamental struggle for dignity, for decency in the treatment of human beings... Is a driving force in all of human history," Secretary of State John Kerry said as he released his department's 2013 human rights report.
But 2013 was "one of the most momentous years in the struggle for greater rights and freedoms in modern history," the top US diplomat told reporters.
Kerry lamented what he said were the hundreds "murdered in the dead of night" in Syria in a chemical weapons attack.
And he noted that in Bangladesh "thousands of workers perished in the greatest workplace safety disaster in history."
Kerry also denounced the rolling back of gay rights in almost 80 countries around the world, which he dubbed "an affront to every reasonable conscience."
The US, he said, promotes global human rights to build a world "where marching peacefully in the street does not get you beaten up in a blind alley, or even killed in plain sight."
The report complained that "around the world authoritarian governments used security forces to consolidate power and suppress dissent to the detriment of their country's long-term stability, security and economic development."
From Sudan in the Horn of Africa, to the streets of Ukraine, the bombed-out neighborhoods of Syria and remote areas of Myanmar, security forces must be held to account for human rights abuses if democratic transitions are to succeed, the report insisted.
"This is about accountability," Kerry insisted. "It's about ending impunity."
In 2013, "transitioning democracies dealt with predictable setbacks in their quest for political change, and new democracies struggled to deliver effective governance and uphold rule of law," the report said.
In order to ensure abuses are brought to justice, countries needed to invest in independent judiciaries and create democratic government institutions.
