The human rights group Amnesty International has criticised the Government for not doing enough to develop a multi-racial society here. In its annual report published today, the group says the past year has seen a rise in racially-motivated attacks and verbal abuse. The Amnesty International report comes as the Catholic Bishops' Conference renews its attack on the Government's refugees' policy. They had previously called for refugee status for all asylum seekers, saying it is morally difficult to expel someone who was kept in this country for a number of years because of delays in processing their application. But that was turned down by the Government, and the latest sally from the Bishops is again critical of the long delays involved. They point out that the Government is falling miserably short of its own target of processing applications within six months.
The Amnesty International report also refers to the murder of the Lurgan solicitor, Rosemary Nelson. It says that Mrs Nelson was killed after the United Nations had issued a warning about the abuse of defence lawyers in Northern Ireland. The UN had said that Mrs Nelson, along with other solicitors, should be protected. Mrs Nelson was murdered in a car bomb attack outside her home in March last year after a series of death threats from Loyalists.
The report goes on to condemn international responses to human rights violations in general, saying world leaders all too often ignore the warning signs and respond either too late or not at all. When the international community does intervene, Amnesty says, it is often for self-serving reasons of power politics.
Amnesty argues that the crises in Chechnya, Kosovo and East Timor last year could have been prevented if human rights had been at the top of the international agenda. "If government decisions to intervene are motivated by the quest for international justice, why do they allow situations to deteriorate into such unspeakable injustice?" the report says. However, in many other cases, the human rights group said, including China and Saudi Arabia, abuses were ignored as diplomatically embarrassing.
