Release of the State Department's Report "Supporting Human Rights and Democracy: The U.S. Record 2004-2005"

Second, I believe that what the Act provides for the human rights component is about $2 million annually for projects to promote human rights in North Korea. There's also money in there for refugees and so on, but that's a different part of the Act. The human rights promotion part is $2 million annually and the appropriators in the last Congress said that the first thing they wanted to see done was to hold an international conference on North Korea human rights. And so we have an NGO that's already pursuing that. I think it'll probably turn out to be a series of international conferences that try to gain interest and support and build up to a bigger one. But that's the activity in that area right now. It's just getting off the ground, but it's pretty exciting.

QUESTION: My name is Thabet El-Bardicy with ATN Production, Denmark.

The U.S. has been receiving some criticism itself for the treatment of people in Guantanamo and 30 of these people have been sent to Pakistan and five to Morocco and four to Saudi Arabia and maybe others. These countries are being criticized in this report. Who oversees their transfer? Is it the State Department or the Defense Department, and what guarantees do you get that they won't be tortured?

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: A good question. With people coming out of Guantanamo, it's a Defense Department responsibility, but they work with and through us in dealing with the other governments, so we are involved in those. I can't talk about individual cases because often you have asylum and refugee-type issues. But to talk more generally, we're party to the Convention Against Torture, which says that you cannot return someone to a country where it is probable that they would be tortured. In our case, we have defined that as saying, when we judge that it's more likely than not that the person would be tortured. In other words, a bare majority of the evidence rather than, you know, beyond all reasonable doubt.

Anyway, what happens is when the Defense Department comes to the conclusion, either, as in many of these cases, that the person poses no further threat to the United States and therefore can be returned to their home country, or if they come to the conclusion that the home country is a better place to keep them under control , the custody arrangements are a Defense Department responsibility, but there will be things like sometimes they say, okay, if the other country just keeps an eye on this person to see that they don't go back to being a terrorist, that that's enough of an assurance that they won't get back in the battlefield.

Once we've gone through all of that, then you have the question of, okay, is this a government that has engaged in torture in the past? And in many of the countries you mentioned, as we've said, there's been a record of torture. Then you say, okay, in order to get assurance that they're not going to be tortured, you have to look at each individual case and say, is this person someone that they're likely to target? Is he being turned over to the custody of a unit of the government that's prone to torture or one that's not?

In some cases, you come to the conclusion that, well, if we got high enough level assurances from a political level in the government that they wouldn't breach those, even though they may have a bad record on torture generally, if you say, I promise I won't torture this particularly guy you're giving back to me, sometimes we judge that credible enough that we can rationalize sending him back.

In other cases, we've negotiated arrangements where we get the assurance, but we also get a promise where there's some ongoing monitoring so that someone, whether it's us or an international organization, is going to be in to see the person periodically and have a look and see whether they're suffering any kind of -- whether the assurances are being upheld.

And there have been other cases where we've said, look, no matter what assurances we got from these people, they probably would torture the guy, in which case, we don't send him back. It creates another problem, though, because you have someone who has been picked up on the battlefield, affiliated with terrorist organizations, but we can't send him back to their own country because they might be tortured. Nobody else wants them because you say, I've got this great guy, he's been in Guantanamo for three years because he was killing people. That's not really an advertisement for somebody to admit them into their country.

And so the result is that a lot of these people are sitting in Guantanamo not because we want to hold them anymore but because we can't send them back. So it's all of those different problems. But what we do go through is an analysis in each case, and when the people are turned over, for example, they have access to Red Cross as well, so that's another vehicle for them to make their concerns known. And that's the way it gets done. It's a fairly precise process.

QUESTION: Pavel Vanichkin with --

AMBASSSADOR KOZAK: Let me add on something. You know, I must add, though, that sometimes you make mistakes. We have let people go from Guantanamo, figuring that they were no longer a threat, and I think about 10 percent of them have turned up later in firefights with American soldiers in other parts of the world. So, you can be imperfect on your judgment as to whether somebody continues to pose a threat. You can also be imperfect on your judgment as to whether you've got adequate assurance against torture. I've heard of this idea of, well, you're working with a wink and a nod. That doesn't work under our law. It's a criminal offense to turn somebody over if they're going to be tortured. And so it doesn't do you any good to just say, well, I got an assurance but I don't really have any belief in it, because that means that you're violating the law.

And I'm sorry I interrupted you.

QUESTION: Yeah. Pavel Vanichkin, TASS News Agency of Russia.

Sir, a couple of weeks ago, there was a press conference on the Capitol Hill. Senators McCain, Lieberman, as well as Congressman Lantos and Wolf, introduced a new legislation. They called for the creation of the new bureau in the State Department, Bureau on Democracy, as well as they called the State Department to publish a new report on human rights -- on democracy, I'm sorry. I asked them about the necessity to do this, and in response they asked me to distinguish between democracy and human rights. They think that you are doing a good job on human rights and not so good on democracy. That's why they called you to publish a new yearly report. So my question is, what do you think about their proposal? Do you think it would be a wise idea to publish a new work report or it would be just a waste of money? Thanks.

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Well, we'll be giving specific comments on that bill through the process of analyzing it and we have a process where Congress sends us draft legislation, and we send back specific comments.

But what I can say, in the overall, is that we support the goals of the legislation, which are to strengthen our capacity to advance democracy. I think as you look at the law, it's a democracy office within the existing Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. When you look at one of the reporting requirements, the one you mentioned, it actually mentions this report and, in effect, says you can have this report with two sections: one on democracy and one on human rights. So it's not quite as wide a divide as some of those comments might indicate.

I would say more generally, philosophically, that democracy is a human right. It's a fundamental human right. It's not something separate from -- when you look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all the elements of democracy are right in there, the right to have free, periodic elections, which I think implies with more than one candidate running for each office. Freedom of the press is in there, freedom of assembly. So all the components you're looking for are already part of that charter of human rights.

And to me, one reason democracy is such a primary element in our policy now is that if you're only trying to defend people's other human rights -- against torture, against abuse of their right of assembly or something like that -- without defending democracy, you find yourself each and every time with foreigners having to try to intervene in particular cases, get this political prisoner released from jail, get the treatment of this person to be improved. If you can help the people in the countries concerned build up their own democratic institutions, the result of that is that they create a mechanism where they can defend their own rights. You don't need so much foreign intervention in individual cases, because you've got a good, credible judicial system if you've got an independent press that's out investigating and you've got opposition political parties calling the government in power on what it's doing. They don't stray as far from the mark on the other ones.

So that's why democracy gets so much emphasis, but I don't see them as being alternatives. Democracy and other human rights are both parts of the same coin. And on the legislation, we'll see as we go along, but we share the emphasis that the bill puts on democracy and, I think, it is obvious from the President's comments that we're very strong on democracy.

Yes, please.

QUESTION: Maria Elena Matheus, El Universal, Venezuela.

Is Secretary Rice planning to go to Latin America and is human rights an issue that's going to be on her agenda?

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Yes. I don’t want to give you particular schedules now. We'll leave that to her schedulers. But I think you can imagine that at some point she will be going to Latin America.

Human rights is very much on the agenda. I think that in most of Latin America, you find at least the basics of democracy in place. I mean, it's actually one of the stories -- when I started out in Latin American affairs 30 years ago, you could literally count on one hand the number of elected governments in the region. And now, you only have to have a finger-and-a-half or so to count the number of unelected governments, so it's a big change.

But that doesn't mean everything is wonderful in the region. When you look around the political systems, often the party politics are based on a very narrow elite where people or large portions of the population feel that they don't really have a stake in what's going on. They have the right to vote, they have the right to assemble and so on, but they haven't figured out how to take advantage of that and the politicians haven't reached out to them, and that's a dangerous situation. And then they feel frustrated that they're not getting adequate work from their government.

You've got cases in some of the countries of backsliding, and Venezuela is one of the countries where, as this report indicates, we've got some serious concerns with freedom of the press, with independence of the judiciary and so on. So you're never going to find a situation where human rights is pronounced perfect anywhere in the world and, certainly, not in the United States. It's always a work in progress, but the key is to constantly work to try to defend and strengthen democratic institutions so that people in countries have the capacity to defend their own rights.

So that's a long way of saying, yes, she will be having this front and center on her agenda, I’m sure, when she talks to leaders in our hemisphere.

QUESTION: Thank you, sir. My name is Ben Bangoura. I'm a Washington correspondent for Guinea News and my first question is about Guinea, which record has been -- has remained, you describe it here, as poor and that is -- despite the fact that you have a variety of program being implemented.

Why do you think your efforts there are not working? Are there any other alternatives?

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Well, I'm not sure I would say efforts aren't working. This business is funny because you work away for a long time, working with people in a country, and sometimes you get the feeling you're going no place. You know, you're training journalists on how to be more effective, professional journalists. You're working with politicians on how do you get away from elitist, bureaucratic-type politics to politics where you're actually trying to figure out what's of concern to your constituents and how do you come up with effective programs to address that and communicate them.

And often, it seems like nothing's happening. You're pushing on the government to be more responsive, less corrupt, all of these things. And then all of a sudden, somehow -- and you never know when this is going to happen -- but the stars get in alignment or something and all these pieces start to work and suddenly you get a fairly sizeable jump forward. So it's a very funny game. Sometimes it's little steps, one after the other. Sometimes it seems like there's no movement and then bang, there's a big change. Suddenly, you'll get a big push of reform going on in the country.

So, it's hard. I mean, this is where the pace is set by people in their own country. What we're doing is trying to give them, as best we can, or help to get them the tools, the skills that will help them to achieve what they want to achieve, but the pace and the strategy and so on is going to be determined by people internally. I think our feeling is as long as we think that there are people in a country that are finding these kinds of things valuable, then we're doing the right thing, whether we see any immediate change or not.

QUESTION: Can I follow up on that? Your government sometime has come under criticism of the way you sometime do business when it comes to democracy, you know, with Africa, for instance. And people are saying that you're not doing enough, pushing enough like you did, for instance -- often -- like you did in the Ukraine or in some other situation. With regard to Guinea, for instance, is there any way you can change the strategy? Because your system there is not working. What's the stumbling block there?

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Well, let me point out a couple similarities and a couple of differences. Some of the differences -- let me talk about Ukraine first and that you had a constellation of forces there. There, it was not just the United States, but you had the whole European Union, you had a desire in Ukraine to have very strong ties and relationships with Europe. It's a European country and they wanted to have, I think, good relations on both sides. But the clear message they were getting -- not just from the United States, but from all the Europeans – was that if you want to have better terms with Europe on all kinds of fronts, you need to get a government that is not the product of rigged elections, you need to have more free press, you need to have all the capacity for people to operate freely. I have to say we had some money to spend on programs in Ukraine over a significant period of time. There's the Freedom Support Act that was passed by Congress back in the '90s to support reform throughout the former Soviet Union and there's still quite a bit of funding in that so that we were able to do it.

Africa -- what you're limited by, often times, is first, there's not as much push from the neighbors. Now, we've actually been trying to work and encourage the African Union and other groups -- I think we saw ECOWAS played a very strong role in Cote D'Ivoire recently. And you need that kind of regional push, as well as support from the U.S. and other outside factors to say, "What is it the neighbors expect of you?" It's not just what does some guy thousands of miles away in Washington think, but what are your own immediate neighbors saying to the government and to the people there, "Here's where we think you should be looking and here's how we can be helpful?"

The other problem we have, and it goes to our internal legislation, is that we tend to have money that's earmarked for certain parts of the world for certain kinds of issues and then there are other places where issues come up, where we have very little money that we have discretion over how to spend it. Unfortunately -- I'll just be clear -- Africa and Latin America are two that don't have much in the way of earmarks, so there's always more that we could be doing, and we don't have the money to do it, unlike some other places where Congress says, "Here's a bunch of money and you have to spend it in this place."

So that's the peculiarity of our system and we try to balance that out by working with -- I mean, we're not the only ones who do this kind of work. European countries, the European Union together also have programs, and so sometimes it'll turn out that they can do more in one area and we can do more in another, and if we work together we can get a pretty good balance amongst them.

QUESTION: Dong Young Yun, Yonhap News Agency of South Korea. Are you going to raise North Korea's human rights problem on the table of the six-party talks if it happens someday in the future for a strong in the first or second or third talks?

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: I think I will leave it to my colleague, Chris Hill, to talk to you about that, but I can say that while those talks are focused on the nuclear issue, they are not completely divorced from human rights issues and then, in addition, we're going to have this special human rights envoy for North Korea. So we're looking for ways to get the human rights agenda and North Korea pushed much more strongly, but it's just how much you do it in one form or another, it's a balancing act. You're trying to pursue several different objectives at once and we need to pursue both denuclearization and human rights at the same time. It's not an either/or proposition.

QUESTION: Thabet El-Bardicy, ATN Production in Denmark. This is about Egypt. The U.S. pressure has been successful in releasing Ayman Noor and there has been some reports that the U.S. -- or there are some talks between the U.S. and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. And yesterday, there was about 70 detained, some of them very prominent in the movement. Are you intending to ask the governments in Egypt to release those as well?

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: I don’t have the details on what they're charged with and so on. Let me make a more general point rather than dealing with that individual case. Well, first off, I won't take credit for Mr. Noor getting out of jail. We are very happy to see that he did get out.

But look, every country has rules about when you can hold a public demonstration and so on that have to be complied if they are reasonable restrictions. I mean, we will say you can't hold a parade on Constitution Avenue during rush hour in the weekday or something. That's a reasonable restriction. If you said you never can hold a parade anywhere in Washington about anything, that's not reasonable, or you can't -- we say we can't hold demonstrations within 500 feet of a foreign embassy.

So some rules have some logic other than suppressing political opinion, you know, traffic control or the orderly access to an embassy or something. But when we look at the overall situation and we look at each case; if we find a deficiency in the opportunities for Egyptian people to get out and express themselves in a peaceful, democratic way -- that's the other qualification -- if people are organizing to do violence or something like that, we don't want to be having contact with them. If it's people who are working peacefully to try to bring about reform and change in their society, then, as I was saying earlier, our policy is to reach out across the board.

And this doesn't mean, when we do that, that we share their ideology. I was Ambassador in Belarus before, and the opposition there consists of everybody from the Nationalist to the Communist Party. Now, on a lot of economic and social issues, I probably didn't find too much common ground with my friend, the head of the Communist Party. But he was willing to work within a democratic system to try to promote his ideals, and that's fine, more power to him. If he can convince Belarusians to vote for him, then he's got every right. The Communist Party took power in Moldova through free and fair elections, and we defend that. We may not agree with their policies on a lot of things, but as long as they keep the system open so that others can challenge those policies and rectify any mistakes they might have made, that's what we're looking for.

It's a process thing rather than a “do we like this group and not like that group.” I think the red lines for us are if the group is promoting violence, no. If they're seeking to pursue their goals through peaceful political efforts, even if we may think that some of their ideas are not workable or whatever, that's their job to convince their own people. And if somebody thinks their ideas are bad, it's other people in their country need to get out and use their rights of free speech and organization to say this guy's ideas are bad, I have a better idea, vote for me.

We're hoping to see that kind of evolution in Egypt and we've seen little bits with the president's statement that they would have multiparty -- or multiple candidate, anyway -- elections for presidency for the first time. I want to see the details on that.

We think it was good that Mr. Nour was let out, but we should not see people being imprisoned just to suppress their views. Reasonable regulations of traffic and so on is a different matter.

QUESTION: Okay, thank you again. Ben Bangoura.

The United States is the first country to call atrocities in western Sudan -- Darfur -- aas genocide. But yet, you refuse to back a resolution would set up a tribunal to bring to justice those responsible for those atrocities. How do you explain this ambivalence of Washington?

AMBASSSADOR KOZAK: Well, thank you for raising Darfur because it's probably the most acute human rights crisis in the world right now. There are lots of bad human rights situation, but this is one where tens of thousands of people have died and a lot more are going to die unless something is done in the near future.

As this book documents -- actually, this is just something we in our office care about a lot. When we started out last summer, we weren't able to get very good information on what was going on in Darfur. It's a remote area, even in Sudan. There were reports of these Jingaweit militia going after people, but the degree to which they were under the control of the government or operating on their own wasn't clear. So one thing we did was we came up with a project -- I'm telling you a long story here and I'll get through to answer your question about ICC but I just want to give you that background.

We came up with a project where we got with some legal NGOs from the U.S. who had people who had legal training. We worked with our people in Bureau of Intelligence and Research -- which isn't an intelligence organization, it's a research organization in the State Department -- and developed basically a scientific polling procedure. And then we sent some of our officers over to Chad, to the refugee camps, along with the people from the NGOs. They went through and did a scientifically random sample, went through this interview with each of the people, and then we took the results of each of those interviews and scored them and went back.

What we found was it wasn't a case of just militias operating on their own. These attacks on villages, in each case, I think virtually every case, started with the Sudanese air force coming in and attacking the village. Then, in about 50 percent of the cases, the next thing they saw were Sudanese regular army troops coming in trucks and destroying the village. And then you would see the militia coming in after them and molesting people.

So we came to the conclusion -- then we were able to go back and corroborate that with other information that we had. So it was this that convinced Secretary Powell to say that the Sudanese Government is responsible for this. He went, Secretary General Annan went to Sudan, got promises, got assurances from the government that they would rein this in. They haven't. It continues. So they've not been truthful in that.

We've taken the lead in the Security Council in getting a first resolution that created this Commission of Inquiry, which came back, went out and gathered even more data than what we had and came back with very similar conclusions. While they didn't say "genocide," they say it's "crimes against humanity" that are occurring. And that's just a question of which label you put on it. The consequence is the same for people.

What we're working on now, we've been working to get sanctions, additional sanctions. One of the troubles with Sudan is we already had so many sanctions on them from our standpoint that it's hard to find almost any new sanctions to impose. It's not because we don't want to; it's because there's so few available left.

The accountability, though, is a major element and something we have been pushing for, that there should be accountability for people there. We proposed a formula that was a mix of an AU/UN-sponsored court, drawing on the experience in Rwanda, which we think has worked pretty well.

I think, as you know, we have a real problem with the ICC and have from its onset. This has nothing to do with Darfur. It has to do with the International Criminal Court because of the way it was set up with its self-defining jurisdiction. And we're trying to work it -- at this point, I think there are three proposals on accountability before the Security Council. One is coming out of some of the African countries who have proposed an African court, some of the Europeans have proposed International Criminal Court and we had proposed something kind of in the middle, this mixed AU/UN special court.

The reason that we think that's important is that, under our own legislation and so on, we can't cooperate with the International Criminal Court. It's a real unfortunate thing that that court got set up with so much opposition in this country, but we don't want the ICC issue to become an obstacle to accountability in Darfur. That's the one thing we all agree on is that there needs to be accountability for people who are engaged in these crimes. And so we're going to keep working with colleagues from Europe and from Africa to try to find a compromise that allows us to have accountability.

MR. GUSS: All right. Well, then I'd like to thank you all for coming here. Assistant Secretary Kozak, thank you for coming and joining us today.