UNITED NATIONS: Human rights are not luxuries, nor can they be bypassed in the national interest, the head of Human Rights Watch told AFP as she attacked nations which ignore violations when it is expedient.

“2023 was an incredibly challenging year for human rights. We saw several patterns that saw the erosion of human rights in many respects,” Tirana Hassan said.

“We saw that even in thriving democracies, there were increasing attacks on the institutions that we rely on to promote thriving open societies that can provide human rights for everyone.”

Hassan warned that alarm bells were also ringing for rights in Europe, for example those of migrant and LGBTQ communities.

India is also “an excellent example,” she said, explaining that the nation — sometimes called the world’s largest democracy — has undertaken a significant crackdown on religious minorities and against government critics.

The last 12 months also saw an upsurge is cross-border repression, with Rwanda and China targeting critics abroad, Hassan said warning that muted global outcry was a tacit endorsement of such actions.

“We saw across 2023 that, increasingly, governments were turning a blind eye to these abuses, domestic abuses everywhere — from Thailand to Vietnam, to Tunisia — were turning a blind-eye to the abuses, and actually moving forward and creating new relationships or what we call ‘transactional diplomacy’,” she said.

“When Western states and members of the EU turn a blind eye to human rights abuses, either domestically or internationally just to advance their own agenda, that is nothing short of hypocrisy.”

Such a “double standard has been noticed by the global south and it is having a corrosive effect on the international institutions that we rely on to protect human rights,” she said.

Notably in the Israel-Hamas war, she said, some countries offered “serious condemnation” of the deadly October 7 attacks by Hamas on civilians in Israel.

“But the response from the US, the EU, and other countries around the world was much more muted when it came to condemning Israeli authorities’ bombardment of Gaza and the death of civilians in Gaza.”

The “double standard,” according to Hassan, is also being weaponized by actors like Russia and China which say “you see these institutions are not for us, human rights don’t apply for everyone.”

“If we take any lesson away from 2023, it’s that human rights will only survive if there is the even application of the moral authority of those rights.

“Human rights are not a ‘nice to have’. It is not for the selective application when countries feel like applying them.”

Hassan is defiant in the face of what she characterizes as large-scale rights violations of the populations of Gaza or in Ukraine.

“2024 is the year where we should not be running away from the atrocities that are happening in the world and the challenges,” she said.

Hassan called 2024 “the year where we should expect human rights organizations, journalists, and most importantly governments… to be doing everything in their power to hold the line and protect human rights.”