World faces Grave Danger,warns Amnesty International

The global economic downturn has aggravated human rights violations and distracted attention from abuses, Amnesty International said on Thursday. `We are sitting on a powder keg of inequality, injustice and insecurity, and it is about to explode,` Irene Khan wrote in a report.

The world faced a grave danger that "rising poverty and desperate economic and social conditions could lead to political instability and mass violence," the rights group's secretary-general, Irene Khan, wrote in its annual report.

As governments struggled to resuscitate their economies, human rights were being "relegated to the back seat," she said, calling for a "new global deal on human rights ... to defuse the human rights time bomb".

This new deal was about governments living up to their obligations on human rights, rather than creating new treaties, she told Reuters in an interview. "We are sitting on a powder keg of inequality, injustice and insecurity, and it is about to explode," she wrote in the report on "The state of the world's human rights".

The worst downturn in decades has plunged large parts of the world into recession, slashing industrial output and trade and throwing many people out of work.

Protests against rising food prices and economic hardships last year were met with tough responses in many countries, and protesters were killed in Tunisia and Cameroon, Khan said.

Source:Ecoterra, May 30, 2009

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