Clinton Given Mixed Grade on Human Rights

The Clinton Administration has placed more emphasis on human rights than did its immediate predecessors but still has fallen “significantly short” in supporting or acting in crisis areas worldwide, according to a report by a human rights advocacy group.

President Clinton has placed more emphasis on human rights than did former Presidents George Bush or Ronald Reagan, said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

But the Administration has “only cautiously embraced the cause, jettisoning human rights when the going gets rough,” the organization said in its annual rights report.

Poor leadership has sapped the Administration’s authority, hurt its credibility and “left unfulfilled Washington’s potential to advance respect for human rights,” the report concluded.

Issued on the eve of the annual Human Rights Day, the report is the toughest assessment to date of Clinton’s performance on human rights.

Human Rights Watch, based in New York, is the world’s second-largest human rights monitoring and advocacy group. Only Amnesty International is larger.

Like many of his predecessors, Clinton “has appointed a number of officials who are vigorous advocates for human rights, but they have had to make concessions to competing foreign policy concerns,” Roth said.

The report is highly critical of the Administration’s entire record in the volatile Mideast.

It charged that the region “appeared to have disappeared altogether” from the U.S. human rights agenda.

In light of the historic Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, “Washington risks squandering this tremendous opportunity by diminishing its human rights advocacy in the region,” it said.

Human Rights Watch also cited the growing cycle of violence in Algeria and Egypt, which responded to often violent challenges from Islamic militants with torture, excessive lethal force and restrictions on association and expression.

U.S. action was limited to “virtual silence and unconditional support for the governments in question,” the group said.