Countries dismiss U.S. human rights report as intervention

BEIJING, March 14 (Xinhua) -- Egypt and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea have joined Russia in dismissing as intervention the U.S. human rights charges against these countries.

The three countries have reiterated their stance on opposing U.S. intervention with their internal affairs and stressed their determination to reject the U.S. charges.

Senior Russian lawmakers dismissed the U.S criticisms as an attempt to exert pressure on their country.

Oleg Morozov, first deputy speaker of the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, said his country had taken effective measures to improve human rights and to build a democratic society but the U.S. report did not reflect the real picture in Russia.

Morozov added the U.S. administration was trying to pressure Russia into making concessions on certain issues.

Leonid Slutsky, first deputy chairman of the International Affairs Committee of the State Duma, said the U.S. Human Rights Report 2009 was neither objective nor comprehensive.

In Cairo of Egypt, the chief of the country's complaint office under the National Council of Human Rights (NCHR) played down the importance of the U.S. report.

"The report released by the U.S. State Department on human rights conditions in Egypt is not new, and it is something usual and released every year on the same pattern," Mohamed Faeq was quoted by the state-run Middle East News Agency as saying.

"We should not pay much attention to such a report, as local reports from the NCHR, civil societies and international, Arab and African mechanisms concerned outweigh such a report," he added.

The NCHR council has already submitted some proposals to the Egyptian government on further improving the human rights conditions in the country, he said.

In the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the official KCNA news agency released a commentary, urging Washington to stop hatching plots on the human rights issue against the Asian country and to solve their own problems about human rights in the first place.

The article said that the United States was using the meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council now underway in Geneva as a platform for "hatching a politically-motivated sinister plot" against the DPRK.

"The U.S. is running the whole gamut of cynical ploys to gather together its followers in a bid to cook up an anti-DPRK resolution," KCNA said.

The commentary denounced the U.S. move as another "infringement" upon the sovereignty and dignity of the DPRK and a "violation" of human rights and democracy.

The U.S. State Department has been issuing annual reports on human rights in various countries since 1977 and the reports have almost always drawn criticisms and rebuffs from the countries the reports criticize.