Secular human rights principles are increasingly colliding with religious motives, threatening a potentially destructive clash of moral systems, Human Rights Watch, the US-based non-governmental organisation, warned yesterday.
"On issues such as reproductive rights, gay marriage, the fight against HIV/Aids, and blasphemy laws, human rights activists and religious groups often find themselves on opposing sides," it says in its annual report.
A religious comeback in many societies had featured "the reassertion of more dogmatic or conservative forms of beliefs" often in opposition to human rights concepts, it said, even though religion continued to inspire much human rights work.
Separately, the group charges that the world's failure to stop "ethnic cleansing" in Darfur, Sudan, last year, together with the collapse of US moral authority following the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, have created a "fundamental threat" to the way the world addresses human rights abuses.
In Darfur, "continued inaction risks undermining a fundamental human rights principle: that the nations of the world will never let sovereignty stand in the way of their responsibility to protect people from mass atrocities", it said.
While the scale of US torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was not on the same level, it posed a threat of equal proportions because the abuser was so powerful. "When a government as dominant and influential as the United States openly defies that law and seeks to justify its defiance, it also undermines the law itself and invites others to do the same," it said.
HRW urged President George W. Bush and the US Congress to establish a fully independent investigative commission to determine what went wrong, and to hold accountable those responsible at all levels of government.
Men described as rogue soldiers by the US administration are facing a court martial in Houston.
Western Europe, the most secularised continent in the world, has found itself at the centre of recent tensions between religious fundamentalism and secular principles.
Dramatic upheaval, for example, followed the killing, allegedly by a Muslim extremist, of Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker. Italy's Rocco Buttiglione, a conservative Catholic, was forced to withdraw as European commissioner because of controversy over his comments about marriage and homosexuality.
Conversely, debates over headscarf bans in France and Turkey raised difficult questions about the individual's right to freedom of conscience.