Amnesty accuses Europe of eroding basic human rights

PanARMENIAN.Net - Amnesty International on Tuesday, January 17 said European counterterrorism measures in the past two years are rapidly — and potentially permanently — eroding basic human rights throughout the continent, The Associated Press reports.

For French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who is now running for the presidency, that's just fine.

"Let's be clear: this terrorist threat will last a generation. Today we have to live with a kind of permanent state of emergency," he told Le Parisien newspaper last week.

The Amnesty International report echoed what other rights groups fear: That Europe has traded away its rights in exchange for a false sense of security. The report examined 14 countries and eight categories, including emergency laws, privacy rights, and efforts to strip nationality from people convicted of terrorism.

"We have to dismantle the paradigm that says there is the state of emergency or nothing in the fight against terrorism, that security equals restriction of rights equals state of emergency," said Dominique Curis, Amnesty's director in France.

Britain's recently passed Investigatory Powers Act law - which offers officials a no-warrant-needed access to the intimate details of citizens' online lives - is among the most severe in Europe, but its implementation has been derailed by a recent European Court of Justice ruling.

In Germany, where a radicalized Tunisian hijacked a truck and mowed down a Christmas market on Dec. 19, the government recently announced measures to force some people labeled potential threats to wear ankle monitors even if they have not been convicted. Truck attacker Anis Amri's asylum request had been denied and he had been flagged as a danger, but paperwork problems delayed his deportation from Germany.