Votes often undemocratic, report says

Authoritarian rulers are violating human rights around the world and getting away with it largely because the U.S., European and other established democracies accept their claims that merely holding elections makes them democratic, Human Rights Watch said in a report Thursday.

By failing to demand that offenders honor their citizens’ civil and political rights and other tenets of democracy, Western governments risk undermining human rights everywhere, the New York-based international rights watchdog said in its annual review.

Still, in a segment of the report titled “Despots Masquerading as Democrats,” the group’s executive director, Kenneth Roth, wrote that “it is a sign of hope that even dictators have come to believe that the route to legitimacy runs by way of democratic credentials.”

Among countries named as major violators of their democratic credentials in 2007 were Kenya, Pakistan, Bahrain, Jordan, Nigeria, Russia and Thailand. The report covered the year through November. In December, Thailand’s military government allowed elections, which ended the junta’s rule after 16 months.

The annual report is the 18th compiled by Human Rights Watch. It summarizes human rights shortcomings in more than 75 countries.

The report also cited abuses by the United States, France and Britain, along with Pakistan, in the name of a “war on terror.”

U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Thursday that he had not read the report.

But promoting human rights, he said, is the core of U.S. foreign policy.

Elections, he told reporters, “evolve in different ways in different states according to their own particular history, values and culture.”