This article in the Huffington Post, entitled "The 10 Worst Countries For Human Rights," lists the countries that were determined by a global analytics firm to be at "extreme risk" of human rights violations. Syria, Sudan, and The Democratic Republic of Congo top the list. Pakistan is notably ranked fourth, and the article refers to the struggle for women's rights there, and specifically to Malala Yousafzai, the young activist targeted by the Taliban for her stance on women's education.
The U.S. is ranked at 139 out of 197 countries, but I was curious as to whether the rankings took into account countries involvements internationally. The United States has certainly interfered in several of the countries on the list. We know from our discussion's of Persepolis that the U.S. has a history of involvement in Iran, and Malala Yousafzai recently spoke out against the use of U.S. drones in Pakistan.
What do you guys think? Did any of the rankings surprise you?
That’s a good question since the US often violates the rights of people outside of the country. I also wonder if they count human rights violations in times of war as violations in this specific case study because this could change the outcome of their statistics. The map on the site of countries with a high risk of human rights violations was really interesting and gave some context to the discussion. (http://reliefweb.int/map/world/world-human-rights-risk-index-2012). Though people tend to believe that there are certain regions of the world where human rights violations are concentrated, there are areas across the globe where people are at a high risk of having their rights violated. I think it is also interesting that the US is ranked as having medium risk because people often want to use America almost as a gold standard for human rights even though there obviously is a risk to have our rights violated.
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