Amnesty International condemns US, China in report

The United States is shirking its duty to provide the world with moral leadership and China is letting its business interests trump human rights concerns in Myanmar and Sudan, a human rights group said Wednesday.

Amnesty International's annual report on the state of the world's human rights accused the U.S. of failing to provide a moral compass for its international peers, a long-standing complaint the London-based group has against the North American superpower.

This year it also criticized the U.S. for supporting Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf last November when he imposed a state of emergency, clamped down on the media and sacked judges.

"As the world's most powerful state, the USA sets the standard for government behavior globally," the report said. It charged that the U.S. "had distinguished itself in recent years through its defiance of international law."

As in the past, the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay came in for criticism. Irene Khan, Amnesty's secretary-general, appealed for the American president elected in November to announce the jail's closure on Dec. 10, 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights.

The State Department had no immediate comment on the report, but said the U.S. was justified in detaining enemy combatants at Guantanamo to prevent them from returning to the battlefield. The State Department has previously said Amnesty uses the U.S. as "a convenient ideological punching bag."

Emerging power China came in for a few punches, too. The report said China had continued shipping weapons to Sudan in defiance of a U.N. arms embargo and traded with abusive governments like Myanmar and Zimbabwe. It said that China's media censorship remains in place and that the government continues to persecute rights activists.