The focus on security in the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks in the United States has led to perhaps the worst marginalisation of human rights in Asia in decades, Human Rights Watch said in its annual report.

The United States came in for particular criticism for its willingness to overlook human rights abuses in a bid to bring Asian governments on side in its ongoing war against international terror.

"When the planes crashed on Sept 11, they drove a large hole through the region's fragile human rights architecture," the New York-based rights watchdog said in its 30th annual report.

"Perhaps more broadly than anywhere else in the world, the United States muted its criticism of opportunistic repression in Asia so as not to offend governments otherwise cooperating in the war."

Many of the region's governments that sought to implement policies restricting human rights took advantage of the new political space provided by the war on terror, the report found.

Falling on deaf ears

"While there was a need in some countries for new laws to deal with issues such as money laundering, most proposed or newly enacted legislation was notable for limiting the rights of criminal defendants and narrowing civil liberties, such as freedom of expression and freedom of association," the report said.

Protests by local activists over new legislation "fell largely on deaf ears".

The leaders of India, Nepal, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Singapore in particular "were pleased to accommodate the new security agenda, which neatly dovetailed with their aspirations to increase state power and marginalise political opponents," the report said.

Human rights activists meanwhile found that taking a stand against the actions of their governments left them in a difficult opposition to their once-allies in the West, and their donors, it said.

The report noted that even the ten-member Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) agreed to cast aside their policy of non-interference to cooperate on law enforcement and extradition matters - a first in the history of the organisation.

The need for support in its war on terror from Asia even prompted the United States to propose Malaysia as the home of a new regional anti-terror body, despite the continued use of the country's draconian Internal Security Act (ISA), which can be used to detain people indefinitely without trial.

Serious risks

In October 2002, Prime Minister Dr Mohammad Mahathir used the war on terror to defend the long-criticised ISA.

"Even the rich countries, the so-called liberal democracies, have decided that there is a need for some preventive action to stop people from doing things that are harmful. People have been detained in other countries now, just as we detain people because they are a threat to security," the report cited him as saying.

More than 70 Islamic militants, believed members of the Jemaah Islamiah (JI) regional terror network, have been jailed under the ISA since mid-2001 in Malaysia, while neighbouring Singapore has rounded up 31 suspected JI members.

JI is blamed for the Oct 12 bombing on Indonesia's resort island of Bali that killed more than 190 people, and centred world attention on the region as the war against terror continued.

Human Rights Watch warned that the emphasis on security over human rights brought "serious risks to Asia".

"The year 2002 made it clear that Asian leaders and their Western patrons and interlocutors must be careful to walk the fine line between preserving security and maintaining popular legitimacy," it said.

Failure to do so, the group said, could lead to the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy: "Intolerant, backwards looking, anti-modern states that could one day slide into fundamentalism." AFP