London:  The United States is shirking its duty to provide the world with moral leadership, and China is letting its business interests trump human rights concerns in Myanmar and Sudan, a human rights group said today.

Amnesty International's annual report on the state of the world's human rights accused the United States of failing to provide a moral compass for its international peers, a long-standing complaint the London-based group has had against the North American superpower. This year it criticised the US for supporting President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan when he imposed a state of emergency, clamped down on the media and sacked judges.

"As the world s most powerful state, the USA sets the standard for government behaviour globally," the report said, complaining that the US "had distinguished itself in recent years through its defiance of international law."

As in the past, the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, came in for criticism. Irene Khan, Amnesty's secretary-general, urged the new US president due to be elected in November to announce Guantanamo s closure on December 10,2008,the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights.

The State Department had no immediate comment on the report, but said the US was justified in detaining enemy combatants at Guantanamo to prevent them from returning to the battlefield. The State Department has previously said Amnesty uses the US as "a convenient ideological punching bag."

China, an emerging power, came in for a few punches, too. The report said China had continued shipping weapons to Sudan in defiance of a UN arms embargo and trading with abusive governments such as Myanmar and Zimbabwe. It noted that China s suppressive media censorship remains in place and the government continues to persecute human rights activists.

Source : PTI