LONDON, May 28 (RIA Novosti) - In an annual report published on Thursday Amnesty International called on the G20 leaders to protect human rights which are being ignored amid the global economic crisis.
"It's not just the economy, it's a human rights crisis: the world is sitting on a social, political and economic time bomb," Secretary General Irene Khan said in London.
In its State of the World's Human Rights report involving 157 countries, Amnesty International said attention had been focused on solving the global financial systems, and that the human rights crisis "both linked to that system and aggravated by that system" had been largely ignored, deepening existing problems in different parts of the world.
Among the issues, Khan listed unemployment, food shortages, social unrest, xenophobia, insecurity, injustice and indignity, adding that this also concerns the world's leading countries.
"The events we've seen in 2008, with the world economic crisis at the top, demand a new kind of leadership from world leaders," Khan said.
"They must take real action, centred on human rights, to tackle growing poverty around the world, and they must invest in human rights as purposefully as they invest in economic growth."
Although the organization praised the new U.S. Barack Obama administration for its stance on torture and the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, the report said the messages were "mixed" adding that "it is too early to tell whether the administration will call as frankly and forcefully on countries like Israel and China as it does others like Iran and Sudan to uphold human rights."
