Rights Abuses Reported in 80% of U.N. Member Nations

Amnesty International said today that it received reports in 1985 alleging human rights abuses in 80% of the United Nations’ 159 members.

In its annual survey, the London-based human rights group assailed what it said was the continued, widespread use of arbitrary arrests to suppress political dissent.

However, the group said it was encouraged by the emergence of over 1,000 rights groups in recent years. “There is more pressure on governments and more signs that governments are reacting to that pressure,” a spokesman said.

The survey included a report that Soviet forces in Afghanistan in April, 1985, massacred hundreds of unarmed villagers during reprisal attacks and also tortured other civilians. The survey also reported slayings of “many hundreds” of unarmed minority Tamils by Sri Lankan government forces and large-scale, court-imposed executions in Iraq, Iran and China.

Amnesty International, which opposes the death penalty, reported that in the United States, 1,642 prisoners were under sentence of death as of December, 1985--an increase of 178 over 1984.

It said 18 convicted U.S. murderers were executed in 1985. It noted that Texas extended the death penalty to a man who committed a murder as a juvenile and that Georgia executed a man who was an accomplice to a murder.

The report also said there were frequent reports that contras fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua carried out torture and assassinations, and it found “indications that assistance from the United States encouraged or condoned such abuses.”

Amnesty International expressed concern that people in the United States were prosecuted for helping Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees enter the country.

The group said “it repeatedly appealed to U.S. authorities not to deport such refugees back to countries where they could face torture and death.”

The survey also cited South Africa for imprisoning about 90,000 people under apartheid laws; the Soviet Union, which it said held more than 600 political prisoners, and Syria, where it said thousands of political dissidents were detained.