Human Rights

Human Rights vs. National Security

Human rights refer to the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled. They include civil and political rights, such as the right to life and liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equality before the law, and social, cultural and economic rights, such as the right to participate in culture, the right to work, and the right to education. [1]

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."
Article 1 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights

In the Case of National Security:
National loyalties have been described as a destructive influence on the human rights movement because they deny people's innately similar human qualities.
With the exception of the non-derogateable human rights (the four most important are the right to life, the right to be free from slavery, the right to be free from torture and the right to be free from retroactive application of penal laws, the UN recognizes that human rights can be limited or even pushed aside during times of national emergency – although

“the emergency must be actual, affect the whole population and the threat must be to the very existence of the nation. The declaration of emergency must also be a last resort and a temporary me
Resource: The United Nations

The Case of US:
Since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, and due to the subsequent War on terror and concerns about national security and terrorism in countries around the world, a number of national laws and measures have come into force limiting some domestic human rights in the name of national security. They include, amongst others, the Patriot Act in the United States and detention-without-trial. The United States has also used extraordinary rendition in order to allow suspects to be subjected to harsh interrogation that may constitute torture in third party states and has employed detention without trial at its controversial facility at Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, contrary to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Torture Policy:
The Bush administration asserts that it does not use or condone torture. Its definition of torture, however, remains unclear. At the end of 2004, the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a memorandum repudiating earlier policies that had permitted a broad range of brutal interrogation tactics by, among other legal sleights-of-hand, redefining torture to exclude all techniques that did not inflict pain equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.. The Department has not, however, ever revealed what its definition currently is.
Authorized Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) interrogation techniques apparently include a notorious method the administration has renamed “water boarding” (when practiced by Latin American dictatorships, it was called “the submarine”) forcefully submerging a suspects head in water or otherwise making him believe he is about to drown. The director of the CIA has stated that water boarding is a professional interrogation technique.
As noted above, the Bush Administration asserts that U.S. treaty obligations to refrain from cruel, inhuman and degrading (CID) treatment do not apply to the conduct of nonmilitary U.S. personnel interrogating non-U.S. citizens outside of the United States.
Led by Vice President Cheney, the Bush administration strongly resisted efforts by Congress to strengthen the legal ban against torture. A measure proposed by Republican Senator John McCain to prohibit torture and other ill-treatment of detainees anywhere by the U.S. military and the CIA passed 90-9 in the Senate but at this writing had not been approved by the full Congress at least in part because of administration objections.[2]

As you see Anti-human rights actions are done a lot in the US – in a country which has been established based on “Bill of Human Rights” and has always condemned other countries of not respecting human rights. You can find a lot more reports and news in suggested sites below and judge about it yourself.

1. http://www.ihrc.org/
2. http://hrw.org/
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights
4. http://www.icrc.org/

References:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights
2. http://hrw.org/