Senator Cardin: U.S. is committed to defend human dignity and justice

"Human rights violators in all corners of the world should understand that the United States is committed to support and defend human dignity and justice for those who stand up against oppression,” U.S. Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in his recent statement on the State Department 2014 Country Reports on Human Rights.

The annual report released later last month highlights that around the world, the suppression and violation of human rights is often employed by authoritarian regimes.

"As Russia slid deeper into international and economic isolation, the Putin regime intensified its crackdown on human rights defenders, including intolerance of any form of opposition and the silencing of independent media and civil society...  In China, the government continued to employ pervasive ethnic discrimination, severe religious repression of Tibetan Buddhists and Uyghur Muslims, and increasing suppression of civil society, in the name of the fight against separatism, religious extremism, and terrorism," he noted.

The government in Azerbaijan, he added, 'continued to repress its critics – harassing and imprisoning dissenters for attempting to express their beliefs.'

“Tragically, 2014 also demonstrated the severity and pervasiveness of anti-Semitism and prejudice in the world today.  Intolerance, expressed by anti-Semitic violence, racism, or xenophobia, takes many forms and wears many faces,' he noted. 

For Senator Cardin, governments, globally, must work to eliminate this intolerance, and the United States must be ready to support this process in every way possible. 

“I applaud the work of our U.S. embassies and Foreign Service officers abroad for the difficult work of chronicling human rights conditions around the world, often in countries where governments are reticent to acknowledge that such abuses take place. Now, we must do our part challenge these governments to uphold fundamental human freedoms, and signal to human rights defenders that their brave efforts are not in vain," he noted. -25D-