The State Department's 2007 Human Rights Report said however that China, which has raised hopes internationally that it would improve human rights by hosting the 2008 Olympics, still had a poor human rights records overall.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the report was aimed at highlighting the struggle for human rights around the world.

"In the long run, we are confident that citizens who sacrifice for their dignity and their rights will prevail, just as the Havels and the Mandelas did before them," Rice told reporters.

"Change may, indeed, change will take time, but change will come."

The State Department said in the report that "countries in which power was concentrated in the hands of unaccountable rulers remained the world's most systematic human rights violators."

It then listed 10 in that category: North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Eritrea and Sudan.

A State Department spokesman though, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters "there is no statutory significance to this list," meaning it does not legally affect the status of relations with Washington.

China had been fingered as one of the worst violators in the 2006 and 2005 reports.

This year China was classfied among authoritarian countries that are undergoing economic reform and rapid social change, but which "have not undertaken democratic political reform," the report said.

But China's "overall human rights record remained poor" in 2007, it added, citing tightened controls on religious freedom in Tibetan areas and in northwestern Xinjiang.

"The government also continued to monitor, harass, detain, arrest, and imprison activists, writers, journalists, and defense lawyers and their families, many of whom were seeking to exercise their rights under the law."

Although there had been some progress in the legal system, "efforts to reform or abolish the reeducation-through-labor system remained stalled," it said.

In seeking to explain China's change of status, another State Department official told AFP: "This year the decision was made that we should make the point that although China has undergone all this economic progress, we haven't seen any progress on political reform."

But the official, who asked not to be named, insisted: "We're not pulling punches with China" and denied any link with the Olympic Games.

Human rights groups though criticized the report.

"For our purposes it's not particularly helpful one way or the other to say this year China was seventh and this year it's 11th. It's a question of whether the full range of abuses has gotten properly addressed," said Sophie Richardson, from Human Rights Watch.

"We're of the view that the human rights situation in China is actually certainly not improving and particularly that there are abuses that are now taking place specifically because China is hosting the Olympics."

On the State Department's second list of authoritarian countries undergoing change, Venezuela, Nigeria, Thailand, Kenya and Egypt were listed along with China.

Human rights had improved in several countries since 2006, including Mauritania, Ghana, Morocco and Haiti.

Little or no progress had been made in Nepal, Georgia, Kyrghyzstan, Iraq, Afghanistan or Russia, while the situation had deteriorated in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the report added.

Sudan's Arab-led government came in for some harsh criticism in particular for its offensive against the ethnic African population in the western Darfur region which the US government has said has triggered a "genocide."

The report referred to "reports of extrajudicial killings, torture, beatings, and rape by government security forces and their proxy militia in Darfur."

Syria, accused by Washington of allegedly supporting terrorism, was also slammed.

"Syria's human rights record worsened this year, and the regime continued to commit serious abuses such as detaining an increasing number of activists, civil society organizers, and other regime critics," it said.

In Uzbekistan, the report said "security forces routinely tortured, beat, and otherwise mistreated detainess under interrogation to obtain confessions or incriminating information."

Community
Email This Article
Comment On This Article

Related Links
China News from SinoDaily.com