Ambassador Michael Kozac, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor briefed foreign journalists on February 25 on the State's Department's 2003 Country Reports on Human Rights.

Kozac highlighted the Millennium Challenge Account, which makes human rights performance a criteria for countries receiving funding from the U.S., as an indication that the Human Rights Reports are playing an increasingly important role in policy debates around the world.

The Human Rights Reports also play a vital role in domestic policies such as immigration, says Kozac. Calling the Reports "the Bible" of immigration judges and officers, Kozac notes that the reports are widely used as a reference tool when determining the status of asylum seekers in the United States.

FOREIGN PRESS CENTER BRIEFING WITH AMBASSADOR MICHAEL KOZAK, PRINCIPAL DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE FOR DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS AND LABOR

THE RELEASE OF THE STATE DEPARTMENT'S 2003 COUNTRY REPORTS ON HUMAN RIGHTS PRACTICES

THE WASHINGTON FOREIGN PRESS CENTER
WASHINGTON, D.C.
FEBRUARY 25, 2004

MR. DENIG: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Washington
Foreign Press Center. Welcome also to journalists assembled in our New York
Foreign Press Center.

Today is February 25th, the day that Congress has mandated for the
Department of State to roll out its Annual Human Rights Report, and we're
doing that today. It's been delivered to Congress.

We are very pleased today to have for our own special briefing here at the
Foreign Press Center the Deputy Assistant Secretary from the Bureau of
Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the Department of State, Ambassador
Michael Kozak. He'll have an opening statement to make, and then after that
we'll be very glad to take your questions.

Ambassador Kozak.

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Thank you. Let me also introduce at the outset my
colleagues, Cynthia Bunton, who is the Director of our Office of Country
Reports and Asylum, and she and her staff of senior editors who are present
here are the people who actually put the report together. So I will be
shameless and draw on them as you have questions that I don't have a good
answer to.

Also, Rob Jackson, who is the head of our Office of Promotion of Human
Rights and Democracy, and he's on the side of what do you do about it,
working with our policy bureaus to try to ensure that human rights and
democracy issues are factored into policy decisions, and also running the
various programs that we have to help promote human rights. We have money
that we actually disseminate from our bureau to that end. So, again,
somebody else who has deep knowledge of many of the issues in the countries.

I thought at the beginning I might just give a brief history of why we
prepare the Human Rights Report, where did it come from, and how is it used.
The Secretary and Assistant Secretary Craner talked on that a little bit
this morning, but maybe we can go into it in a bit more depth and then move
into your questions.

I've been around the U.S. Government long enough to remember when the
requirement for a Human Rights Report was instituted. I think 1978 was the
first year we actually produced one. But it was mandated by Congress with
the view that Congress, I think, felt that they weren't getting enough input
on the human rights situations in other countries that we were giving
foreign assistance to. So their initial requirement was that the President
should each year give the Congress a report on human rights in those
countries that were receiving funds under U.S. aid programs. So, at the
beginning, that was a subset of countries in the world.

Later on, though, as people started to realize how useful this was in making
policy decisions on aid, they started to say, well, we do trade, we do
military training, we do cultural exchanges, and whatever other types of
interaction we have with other countries, so knowing what the human rights
situation is in those countries is also useful for that purpose. So
Congress expanded the mandate to say that we should do the reports on all of
the countries that are members of the UN. So that's what we're required to
do.

The reports, as a result, are used in making those kinds of decisions. New
elements that have come up in recent time are the Millennium Challenge
Account, which is coming into play. And one of the key criteria for
countries being able to compete for funds under that new program is their
human rights performance. So while this may not be the exclusive document
on human rights that they'll look to, it's an important one and it will be
useful in that context.

Another one that I think people don't always think about it -- and Roy Potts
is here somewhere, who is in the back, is also in our Country Report and
Asylum Office, but heads up the work on asylum. When people apply for
asylum in the United States -- and there are tens of thousands of them that
do so each year -- they're claiming that if they're returned to their home
country that they're going to be persecuted for religious, political, social
reasons, or membership in a group. The immigration officers who are
assessing their claims and the immigration judges who are assessing their
claims need some baseline: What are the conditions in that country? Does
this person's story stack up against the known facts about what's going on
in that country? And our whole immigration apparatus that we've met with,
and the judges, say that they consider the Human Rights Report the bible for
that purpose, that that's the first place they turn when they're trying to
make those kinds of judgments.

So what I wanted to give you was a sense that it's not just something we do
to be judgmental about other countries. It's something we do for our own
internal reasons that has important effects on our relationships with other
countries. But it's not the report that's having those effects, it's the
facts that are reported in the report that do so.

If we've done our job right, the report should basically speak for itself.
It's not trying to draw a lot of conclusions. It's trying to report the
best information we can get our hands on about what's going on that relates
to human rights in different countries. And we will always see how people
think. Everyone always has something to complain about in that respect, but
we take complaints seriously. We strive for accuracy. And I think we've
been doing a pretty good job of that in recent years.

I think the other thing notable about the reports over the last couple of
years is that the length of them has been reduced significantly, I think by
about 25 percent now from where they were two years ago, but without any
loss of content or quality. And that was our goal. It was to make them
more readable, more useable, without sacrificing the content that's
important for the reasons I just gave.

Anyway, that's the background on the Human Rights Report and why we do, and
why we're here today. So, with that, I'd like to open it up and hear your
questions.

MR. DENIG: Let me remind you to please use the microphone, introduce
yourself and your news organization. We can start with the gentleman right
here.

QUESTION: Richard Finney, Radio Free Asia.

With regard to Burma, is that situation improving at all? What was the
picture there this last year, and is there anything that can be done to
really push it in the right direction?

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: The picture, I think, laid out in the report is that it's
extremely poor and actually got worse last year, particularly with the
attack on Aung San Suu Kyi's motorcade, and the murder and abuse of hundreds
of people in that connection. So it's not a pretty picture. It hasn't been
in some time.

In terms of what we're trying to do about it, of course, we use our
diplomatic efforts. We've got a program to try to help support people who
are working for democracy in Burma. Obviously, we aren't giving assistance
to the government, but we're trying to assist people in the society around
there to do what they can to build up their force.

But what we're looking for is to try to get the government into dialogue, a
genuine dialogue with all the different political groupings in the country
and to open things up again. It's very, very repressive, as you know, as is
documented in the report.

MR. DENIG: Let's go to Russia in the second row.

QUESTION: Pavel Vanichkin, Itar-Tass News Agency of Russia.

I read three latest reports, and I think that this one, the newest one, is
-- correct me if I'm wrong -- more harsh and less benign towards Russia than
the previous versions. Would it be correct to explain it that the situation
in Russia itself has worsened, or the State Department decided to take the
more hard approach to it?

And the secondly and very briefly, let me quote from the introduction.
"Some events in Russia" -- I missed them -- "raised questions about the rule
of law in Russia." Could you try to answer the question you raised: Is
there a rule of law in Russia today?

Thank you.

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: I think the report on Russia says that human rights were
generally respected, but the situation got worse in some respects. And I
think that's very consistent both with the facts that are reported in the
document itself and I think it also was previewed by the Secretary of
State's op-ed piece in Izvestia and some of the statements that he made in
Russia.

The concerns arise over things like the shutdown of the last independent
television stations. The elections in Russia this year were found by
observers not to meet international standards in all respects. And so those
are setbacks from where Russia was a few years ago, and it's those facts,
those developments, that are driving things.

Rule of law -- I think we documented our concerns about selective
prosecution and the use of the legal system sometimes in ways that at least
gives the appearance of being politically motivated.

I think, though, as the Secretary made clear, though, we've been talking to
Russia as friends about these concerns. I think he was very clear in saying
we aren't saying that Russia has gone back to Soviet times or something.
It's way, way, way beyond that, but that these concerns that have come up in
the last year are ones that we want to flag, we want to call to the
attention of our friends in the Russian Government and in the Russian
society so that they can get a handle on them and try to turn things back
around in a positive direction.

So it's, I'd say, a cautionary note, shall we say, as opposed to a judgment
that everything has gone terrible.

MR. DENIG: The lady in the middle there.

QUESTION: Daphne Fan, ETTV from Taiwan.

In the section on Taiwan, you said that the Taiwan Government respect the
right of citizens to change their government. We know next month we are
going to have our presidential election and we will also have defensive
referenda, which you also mentioned in your annual report in Taiwan section.

Do you think that this, it is progress for Taiwanese people in terms of
human right to have this right to have a referenda next month?

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: One of the key indicators, and this is why, actually, in
all of these Human Rights Reports, when you read the first paragraph, has to
do with the political system in the country. And one of the key factors
there is -- Are there free, periodic elections? Are people able to express
themselves and organize politically and change their government, change the
policies of the government, through that means?

I think that's not just coincidental that we put that number one. It's
because if people have those rights, they can take care of a lot of the
other problems themselves. If there is abuse by security forces, if there
are bad prison conditions, if their policies towards women are not
appropriate or something, if people have the right to organize and they have
the right to vote and they have to right to change out the politicians that
rule the country, they can fix a lot of those problems themselves without a
lot of external provocation.

So that's why it's very important, and yes, that's why Taiwan, I think, gets
a very good report in this report in terms of political freedom in the
country.

QUESTION: Can I follow up?

MR. DENIG: Okay. We can do that.

QUESTION: John Zang, CDI TV of Taiwan.

Sir, in that report, there was concern about political parties influencing
TV stations, TV news and stuff. But that has been balanced by cable TV
networks. What do you mean? I mean, you know, why are you saying what is
reported in the report? How do Taiwan political parties influence on TV --
television?

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Let me turn to Ann Marie.

MS. JACKSON: It's important that all the political parties have the right
to speak out and to make their opinions heard. However, if they're
controlling too strictly the TV coverage and they're not allowing other
groups to speak out, this is an issue. And we feel that cable TV has
provided other routes, other alternatives for a variety of actors in
society, to make their perspectives heard. So it's a positive development.

QUESTION: Your name and title, please?

MS. JACKSON: Ann Marie Jackson, Senior Editor, Human Rights Reports for
East Asia and the Pacific, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, U.S.
Dept. of State.

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: I mean, I think it's a similar concern to the one we just
mentioned with Russia, that if you end up with one group owning or
controlling all the TV stations, it makes it harder for others to get their
views expressed. It's nice to have a multiplicity of views.

It's not necessarily that because a government TV station is there that it's
only going to show the government point of view. But it doesn't give you
quite as much reassurance as if there were a multiplicity of owners and
viewpoints.

QUESTION: Adu-Otu, AfricaNewcast.com. It has been my experience over the
years that when these reports are issued, the governments of the most
egregious countries of anti-human rights behavior tend to deny a lot of the
aspects of the reports. And it has been also the practice of the State
Department not to respond to those denials, which, therefore, leaves some
type of credibility gap for -- especially for reporters, how we interpret
these kinds of findings.

As a matter of fact, in 19 -- in 2001, two of the presidents were here in
the country to deny those reports personally, and there was no answer from
the State Department. Can you comment on that?

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Yeah. I mean, I've been in that situation myself. The
last two countries that I was head of our mission in were Cuba and Belarus,
both of whom have very serious human rights problems. And we do invite
governments to give us corrections. If they think that something that we've
said in the report is not correct, we say, "please tell us, so we can
correct it in next year's report."

Now oftentimes what they tell us, we don't consider dispositive and to
resolve the issue. We will, though, mention it. We'll say in the report
that we believe this, the government has denied it. We give them their
right to say a denial.

At the same time, though, in those cases, at least I know what our practice
was in the embassies, was when the government would deny something, if we
didn't think that was correct, we'd say we stand by our report. So we, in
effect, disagreed with them.

So I guess I would invite you to come back, in a specific instance, if
somebody denies something, to come back and ask us.

What I have noticed, though, is what most of these guys do is that they
won't deny the specifics. I actually had him confirm a couple of things
once by saying we didn't arrest and torture this guy on this date, it was a
different date, which tended to confirm the basic story. We corrected the
date in the next edition.

But what they often do is make a general attack on the process of the Human
Rights Report, saying: This is the State Department collecting statements
from exiles who have a political ax to grind. They don't know what's going
on in the country, et cetera, et cetera.

So they try to discredit -- they don't try to address the facts that we
report. They just try to discredit either our motives or the motive of the
people they assume are the sources of our information. And, usually, it's
not worth getting into a debate with them about a battle of motives.

But if we're asked -- and I would invite you to do so -- if somebody is
denying something in here, please do come back to us and we'll get you a
response to it, which, I think, unless we feel that we've made a mistake, in
which case, we'll say so; the rest of the time we say, no, we stand by
what's in the report.

MR. DENIG: Okay. First row.

QUESTION: Thank you. Javier Garza from El Heraldo in Mexico City.

A couple of questions, Ambassador. The first is, it seems that Latin
America seems to be fading away every year in the report and less and less
countries are being mentioned. In this case --

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Well, they're all mentioned --

QUESTION: I'm sorry?

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: -- because every country who's a member of the UN is --
there's a report on every country.

QUESTION: No, I know. But I mean for, you know, citing that the situation
isn't good on human rights. I could, you know, from reading this see
Venezuela and Cuba. My question is, to what extent has Latin America
stopped being a concern for the United States in terms of human rights --
Latin America on one hand, and Mexico specifically?

And the second question would be, this report says that some countries tend
to cloak their repression in the, you know, the label of the war on terror.
And some of the countries mentioned here for violations of human rights are
countries that the United States consider allies in the war on terrorism:
Pakistan or Uzbekistan, for example.

You know, how does the United States then treat those countries and
negotiate with those countries?

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Good question. On Latin America, I think what you may be
detecting there is, unlike maybe 15 years ago where -- well, when I came
into the State Department, you could literally count on one hand the number
of elected governments in Latin America. [Almost] every country had a
dictatorship of the right or the left. So, in that sense, there's been real
progress in our region over the last 15, 20 years in that most countries now
have elected governments, and that's a good thing.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean all human rights problems have been
solved. And those governments are struggling to try to consolidate
democracy and trying to, then, move beyond just the fact of free elections.
How do you build deeper institutions, eliminate corruption, and so on?

And we've got large programs of assistance going on throughout Latin America
on such things as political party development, where you're trying now not
just to democratize the process at the day of the election, but trying to
democratize the parties themselves so that they're more responsive, more
inclusive, bringing, for example, indigenous groups that had been outside
the political process, and other groups that have been outside the political
process in many of these countries for years, into the mainstream.

How do you make it so that people have that opportunity? We're doing a lot
of assistance with rule of law and administration of justice. This is
something we started years and years ago, but they continue.

I think maybe the reason there's not so much drama in it anymore as there
might have been some years back, is that for the most part, with a few
exceptions in the region, we've got governments in place that are,
themselves, trying to move forward on these things. And so we go about it,
we do it, and there's no big negotiation. There's no big, dramatic event
where somebody signs an accord, but every day people are working away to try
to make election systems better, to try to improve the quality of
independent media, to try to improve the representational aspect of
political parties and improve judicial institutions, improve prison
conditions and all of those things. And it's a long, hard struggle. It's
development. But we're doing it in a much better environment than we might
have some years ago.

On the issue of the war on terror and our allies in that struggle, I think
that this was alluded to a little bit by [Assistant] Secretary Craner and by
the Secretary. I think there's still this idea out there that you either
find a country is a good, human-rights-respecting country, or we have
nothing to do with them. And if you have something to do with them, then
you're overlooking their faults. The war on terror has actually brought
about, in my judgment, a contrary connection between the two things.

As Secretary Craner was laying out what was going on in Central Asia, I
think a lot of people were worried when, right after 9/11, they said, "Oh,
you know, here we're going into Central Asia. We're going to end up hooking
up with some of these regimes that are not democratic and don't treat their
people very well, and we'll forget all about human rights."

What's happened is the opposite: We've used the engagement with them on the
anti-terror side to promote the human rights and democracy agenda. And
that's not something we're doing out of, sort of, altruistic motives. We
like to think that we're promoting values that we deeply believe in
throughout the world, but there's a more practical side to it.

I'd refer you to the National Security Strategy of the United States that
was put out, what was it, about a year and a half ago, where they very
strongly make the connection between democratization and human rights and
the absence of terrorism and the absence of other crises.

Basically, for the first time, we're explicitly saying this, that our
interests, which haven't changed much: We want to see stability in the
world; we want to have stable trading relationships with other countries and
have commercial opportunities and good markets for our goods. We don't want
to see refugee crises. We don't want to see civil wars and all of that.

But what we came to the conclusion is that you don't accomplish those
objectives, except in the very short term, by aligning yourself with a
dictator who's repressing people, impoverishing people and so on. Because,
as the Secretary has said on several occasions, and the President, I think,
most recently and eloquently in his speech at the National Endowment for
Democracy in November, that repression breeds terrorism and poverty breeds
refugee flows and civil strife and instability and so on.

So, as part of the war on terror, it's not just our cooperation with other
governments that are trying to arrest al-Qaida people or take down training
sites or something, we're also trying to say, how do we do things in your
country so that you don't start breeding more terrorists, or continue to
breed terrorists?

And so the dialogue with them is very, very much focused on these. A lot of
our assistance programs, when you get the breakdowns -- and I invite you to
do that -- of what monies we're giving, you know, in military aid, you'll
find there's a huge component also of democratization and governance and
those kinds of programs.

And even on the military side and security force side, one of the things
I've found over my experience is, if you do it right, when you're training
and working with another security force, to be professional, it means you
respect human rights. It's not that you're a fighter here and then human
rights is a separate component over there. A good soldier doesn't abuse
people and doesn't shoot civilians indiscriminately. A good policeman
doesn't torture people and do bad things. So you can use the engagement on
that level to improve the human rights side of things.

So the interesting thing that's happened is that we've actually gotten into
far deeper dialogue about human rights and we've started to see some
improvements in some of those countries, and some of them, I think,
[Assistant] Secretary Craner ticked off this afternoon, the printing press
in Kyrgyzstan and so on.

But I would also give you a vignette. He mentioned the trip he and
Assistant Secretary Jones took through the region, through the Central Asian
region not too long ago. And I won't name the country, but in one of the
countries they were talking about human rights and democracy and having
pretty good conversations with everybody until they got up to a very high
level in the government. And at that point, their interlocutors said,
"Well, we don't need to talk about this stuff because you have a base here
and that's what's important." And the response that he got was, and not
from the human rights guy, not from Lorne [Craner] but from Beth Jones, was,
"A base is not the basis for a relationship; the basis for a relationship
with the United States is that you have to be showing that you're really
making forward progress on democracy and human rights."

So that's a long answer, but I think it's an important aspect of what we're
trying to do.

MR. DENIG: Let's go to Finland next.

QUESTION: Jyri Raivio, Helsingin Sanomat, Finland. This morning, Senator
Hillary Clinton spoke at Brookings on various things, including her concern
of the women's rights, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan. She even said that,
in many respects, women were better off under Saddam Hussein than they are
now. What's your comment on that?

And another small thing. Do you audit yourself?

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Okay. On the first point, I think I would respectfully
disagree with Senator Clinton about the luxuries of women under Saddam
Hussein or anybody else under Saddam Hussein. I mean, that one, I don't
know what she said so I don't want to comment on her remarks. I didn't hear
them myself. But I don't think that we would agree at all with the idea
that women were better off in Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

That's not to say that there aren't really serious issues to be dealt with
in terms of women's rights in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, for that matter.
And this, again, goes back to the question we were talking about on Taiwan.
This is why getting a democratic political process set up and building
growing institutions in the country that can debate and sort out these
issues so that women in Iraq themselves can assert their rights, that's very
important and that's what we're trying to do.

On the question of whether we rate ourselves, the answer is no. We tried it
once many years ago and the result was not credible. It would be like one
of you trying to write an investigative story about your own newspaper or
about your own family or something. Whether you were accurate or not, no
one would believe you. So we don't make the attempt, and you'll see that in
this year's report that the section on Iraq cuts off at the time that the
coalition started military action in Iraq.

That's not to say that we're trying to avoid ratings. It's that we're not a
credible rater of ourselves. But we do get rated by a number of
institutions. Human Rights Watch has done reports on us. Amnesty
International and the Swedish Government do reports on us. I used to have
to, in one of my earlier incarnations, defend cases against us in the
Inter-American Human Rights Commission. And we're constantly in there with
people bringing human rights complaints against the United States. And, you
know, most of the time we think we're right and we have a good defense.
Sometimes it turns out that we need to change something.

So we welcome the scrutiny. It's just that we're not very good scrutinizers
of ourselves or not very credible ones.

MR. DENIG: All right. Let's take the lady in white there.

QUESTION: Hi, my name is Helena Djordjevic. I work for Radio B92, Serbia
and Montenegro.

I would like to hear your views on the human rights record in Kosovo, which
is a province under international administration. The report mentions
incidents of politically motivated murders and limitation of freedom of
movement. How do you see the whole situation, especially in the European
context?

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Well, I think the report tries to lay out the facts. And
those are there. Also the inability of people to reintegrate, the sort of
ghetto-izaton of the situation in Kosovo. So those are the problems that we
have to work on. But it's not a great situation. I think, again, it's
better than it was when you had war and, you know, pillage -- that what was
going on with all the fights there a few years ago.

But human rights is an interesting thing because it's never perfect. No
country ever is going to get a perfect record on human rights. There's
always going to be violations. There are always going to be problems. The
question is, are you working and are things moving in a more positive
direction or a more negative one? And sometimes they're moving in both
directions at once. And that's what we're really trying to track here and
see where there are opportunities to try to move them in a more positive
direction.

Again, it was mentioned in the earlier briefing, but I would put in a plug
also for Rob's office that works on the programs, what are we doing about
these problems, will be putting out a report in a month, again, mandated by
Congress. So this report is the report about what are the problems in the
world, what's the situation on human rights in these countries.

So the second report, and it only deals with the countries that have the
most difficult problems -- about 92?

A PARTICIPANT: 102.

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: 102, this year, countries. So it won't be every country,
but ones where there are significant issues here. You'll have a report in a
month that says, here is what the United States is doing about it, in terms
of diplomacy, in terms of assistance programs, in terms of linkages to our
military interaction with other countries. And so you get a more
comprehensive picture of what we're trying to accomplish, and how.

MR. DENIG: Let's go to Egypt.

QUESTION: Sir, my name is Khaled Dawoud from the Egypt Al-Ahram newspaper.
I actually had a question concerning the section on Israel's practices in
the occupied territories. One problem, unfortunately, I mean, is the issue
of credibility in the Arab world of what the United States think of Israel's
practices. And here I can find that you're describing, you know, excessive
use of force -- shelling, bombing and raiding of Palestinian civilian areas
and demolition of homes, as an abuse, continuing abuse.

Don't you think this is too mild, I mean, compared to other countries? I
mean, when shelling and bombing and destroying houses, doesn't this, like,
make many people in the Arab world question the credibility of the report?

Thank you.

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Well, I read that portion of the report myself, and I
found it to be pretty hard-hitting. That's not all it describes. It says
the situation of human rights in the territories in poor, and holds Israel
responsible for a lot of that.

It also, I should say, if you look, there is also a section there on the
contribution of the Palestinian Authority to the situation of people in the
occupied territories. And that's not a very nice report either. I mean,
both parties that have authority in that area, or have authority in a
practical sense over people's lives and are doing things that affect
people's lives, are doing things that are very adversely affecting people in
the West Bank.

And, you know, the final solution to that is going to be a political
solution to the underlying issue and the two-state solution that President
Bush has envisioned, and it's laid out in the roadmap. But we're trying to
monitor what's the human rights situation, in the meantime, and it's not
good. And I think the report -- I guess I'm a little surprised to hear the
idea that it's going light on Israel.

MR. DENIG: Okay. Let's take the gentleman in the glasses over there.

QUESTION: Hi, my name is Djono Sujono from Indonesia.

Sir, I just wondering what this action of the report will influence the U.S.
policy toward the countries involved, particularly on foreign assistance
program, military assistance and FMS program, and also on humanitarian aid
program.

Thank you very much.

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: It really depends on -- I mean, there are some influences
that are built in by statute. And it doesn't say if the report says X, then
we must do Y. But, for example, there's Section 508 in the Foreign
Assistance Act that says we can't give assistance to a government that comes
in as a consequence of a coup against a democratically elected government.

So in applying that, it's not what the report says, it's the facts on the
ground. Hopefully, the report accurately reports that. If there's been a
coup in the last year against that government, then we can't give it
assistance.

There are also, for example, Leahy Amendments that say when we're doing
training through IMET or other military assistance that we have to look and
see, are the units that we're giving training to, have people in those units
been involved in gross abuses of human rights? If they have, we can't give
any training or assistance to that unit unless the government concerned
removes the person from the unit and prosecutes them for their adverse act.

So the linkage is not the Human Rights Report and the statute. The linkage
is the facts -- the human rights violations themselves and the various
statutes. But the Human Rights Report is one major way that the Congress
has of learning about what the situation is in a country and then being able
to apply that.

Now the other effect it has, though, is not that exact statutory linkage --
that if there's gross human rights abuses, you may not give assistance to
this country. It can also be that the Congress is just looking and saying,
"Okay, we want to appropriate," or the Administration, for that matter --
when we're making our own proposals to Congress or we're allocating the
assistance funds that we have discretion over, we're always looking at the
human rights situation.

We go to the policy meetings where those decisions are being made. And one
of the factors that always comes up is, what are they doing on human rights?
And we say if it's a government that wants assistance of some kind and we
see that their record has been really bad, we may say that we shouldn't give
it to them because it'll just be embarrassing to us or, more often, we try
to use it to get something. We say, "Okay, we're prepared to give you some
assistance, but only if you take this and this and this step," -- it's a
negotiating process. But you take concrete steps to move yourself into a
better human rights position. So that's the way it gets utilized in
policymaking and influences all of those assistance programs.

And it influences other things like who you meet with, at what level, how
frequently. You know, the whole gamut of our relationships with other
countries is affected. But again, it's not affected by what we report in
the report. It's affected by what happens on the ground.

If we didn't report it in the report, and it got reported in the newspaper,
the Congress would see it and say, "Well, why didn't you tell us this? And
we're going to withhold aid to this country because they had a coup, even if
you didn't put it in there."

MR. DENIG: All right. Let's take the gentleman in the middle in the blue
jacket, please.

QUESTION: Hi. I'm Minh Hung Nguyen of the Vietnam News Agency.

So what are the countries of your particular concern on human rights?

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Well, there's not a list of countries of particular
concern on human rights. The CPC list -- Countries of Particular Concern --
relates to international religious freedom, which is one subset of the human
rights covered in this report. But I think, in the last year, the countries
that were listed as Countries of Particular Concern were Burma, Iran, North
Korea, China, Sudan and Iraq. So that was the list last year. But every
year, there is a new determination made. Our Ambassador for International
Religious Freedom, John Hanford, has to assess the religious freedom
situation in all the countries. We don't start out saying, "Which ones will
we target?" We look at all the countries that we've looked at today, what's
going on there. He says which are the ones of particular concern.

We also have the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. It's
made up of people outside the government who are brought in to work this as
well. And they make their recommendations. And then those recommendations
go up to the Secretary of State, to the President, and the decision is made.

So we're required by law to make the determination each year. That's a
little farther down the time [line]. It's not actually by a given date. I
think the determination can be made at any given time as to who's on the
list but it's under constant review.

But what I want to emphasize is that Countries of Particular Concern relates
exclusively to religious freedom and not to broader issues of human rights.
But certainly religious freedom is a very important component of human
rights.

MR. DENIG: All right. Let's go to the gentleman in the middle in the
orange shirt, followed by the gentleman in the front.

QUESTION: Emad Mekay with Inter Press Service and also with Asharq Al-Awsat
Newspaper, Saudi Arabia.

Sir, on the Israel and the occupied territories section, I just got that
right now actually, and I quickly looked through it and I did not see you
mentioning the wall there -- the security wall.

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: The security barrier, I think, is mentioned six or so
times, at least.

QUESTION: All right.

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: I went through it the other day, frankly. And describes
the effects on people's lives of not only of the big security barrier that
Israel has been working on, but also of checkpoints, of fences and other
barriers that have been put up in the territories that affect the movement
of people back and forth, checkpoints. And so it adds a fairly -- if you
count those, I think it's more like 12 or 15 incidents or descriptions of
things. So it is -- I invite you to read it. It is included --

QUESTION: (Inaudible) I was wondering if you could --

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: I was reacting --

A PARTICIPANT: (Off mike.) It's security barrier, not the wall, the
Israeli fence --

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: No, actually, I think they use a different expression.
We're trying to use a policy-neutral thing. In some places, it's a wall; in
some places, it's a fence; in some places, it's motion detectors; in some
places, they're using natural terrain features like gullies. And you can't
say those each time, so we just tried to find a term that covered all of
them.

But it has no meaning in itself. It means the construction, all the stuff
that they're constructing. And the issue that is laid out in the report is
the effect that that's having on children being able to get to school,
people being able to get to hospitals, people being able to get to their
work and so on.

So that's, I think, quite extensively covered in the --

QUESTION: Actually, I was only trying to have you say in your own words why
the wall is a concern to the U.S.

Another question here, sir, I was wondering if you could give us your own
personal view on the banning of the Al-Arabiyya and Al-Jazeera TV channels
in Iraq by the U.S.- appointed Governing Council.

I know that, I mean, you cut off your report on Iraq after the invasion, but
still, given the general atmosphere that the U.S. is trying to promote
democracy in the Arab world, why would we in the Arab world think that you
are serious about democracy if you are -- your own appointed people are
committing human rights, what we think, human rights violations?

Thank you.

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Let me hit the issue of the security fence/barrier/wall
construction. What we're trying to get across there is there's nothing
inherently wrong with having a border fence or something like that. In
parts of our border with Mexico, there's a fence. Other countries have
fences or walls or whatever along their borders. And an occupying power in
an area also has capacity to build security, reasonable security facilities.

But what you have to look at is what -- is this having negative effects on
people? Are effects avoidable, or unavoidable? Could they be mitigated in
some way? We're not trying to decide those issues on this or anything else.
This report is trying to lay out facts, not to reach legal judgments. In
fact, I think it's very clear in the preamble to the report or in one of the
definitional annexes that we're not drawing legal conclusions about whether
the facts are a violation or not of human rights or humanitarian law. We
leave that to the reader to draw based on applying the law and the facts
together. Because we report a lot of facts here that aren't necessarily a
violation of something. They're in there because they give you the context
and the effect of what's going on.

But the concern that we have about these issues in the occupied territories,
in the West Bank, is that in many places, parts of the Palestinian
population have been cut off from other parts, that their ability to conduct
their normal lives is very seriously affected.

I think it also notes in there, though, that the Israeli Government, as the
year ended, it said that it was reconsidering the routing and construction
of the placement of the barriers, and also that there had been petitions
filed in the Israeli Supreme Court over this, and so there may be, you know,
another variant that comes out of it as a consequence of that.

So we were trying to give the whole picture there of what's going on with
regard to the barrier and the effect on people's lives. What conclusions
you draw from that is a separate matter.

On the TV stations, I think the Defense Department has addressed the
reasons. We are in favor of freedom of speech, freedom of media and so on,
but when sometimes when you're in a war zone, you have certain restrictions
that get put on and they've, I think, discussed why the Governing Council
found it necessary in that respect.

MR. DENIG: As I recall, I think the specific issues were that those TV
stations were broadcasting tapes inciting people to kill either Iraqi
officials or Americans. Freedom of the media is one thing, but inciting
people to kill others is clearly a breach of professional responsibility of
the media.

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: So that's it.

MR. DENIG: Second row here.

QUESTION: Khalid Rehman, APP from Pakistan.

I'm interested to know one thing. The -- I mean, in a country where --
which is developing and where there are no traditions of democracy, or they
are -- or some way not established, is there any mechanism or support system
to educate them or some way -- I don't know how to term it -- I mean, to
ensure to be consolidated somewhere, like --

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: No, absolutely. And this is one of the things we look
for in countries that either have not yet become democratic or may have
become democratic and then slipped backwards because the democracy wasn't
deeply rooted enough. And this is the kind of programs I was talking about
earlier, trying to work with development of political parties, with
development of independent media in countries. And we give quite a lot of
support.

In Pakistan, we have -- we could get you figures on that -- but there are
programs in Pakistan as well to that end.

I've never bought the argument that certain countries aren't ready for
democracy. If you ask most people around the world, "Would you rather have
input and influence into decisions that are made about your life, or just
have somebody boss you around," you don't find too many people voting to
have someone boss them around and have no control over their own lives.

So, in that sense, people are usually very ready for democracy. The trouble
is building the institutions that support it and defend it against
anti-democratic movements and tendencies, and that's a longer term
proposition. It's not just having one free election that brings you a
democracy. It's working and you do get backsliding and then you hopefully
move forward.

But what we look for in partners with other governments is -- is the
government we're working with, even though it may not be democratic, is it
trying to bring about change in its country or is it trying to resist it?
That's a big factor for us as well.

But we'll -- perhaps we can follow up and give -- you didn't ask me exactly
what we were doing in Pakistan, but I think that we are doing some
significant things there as well.

MR. DENIG: Okay, the last question will go back to Finland.

QUESTION: Jyri Raivio, Helsingin, Finland. It's a proper last question.
What's your view globally? Are things going for the better? Without
mentioning any names or countries, is human rights situation globally better
than it was a year ago or worse?

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: A year ago? I guess I take a longer view. I'm getting
older where 30 years doesn't seem that long to me anymore. And, you know,
all I can say is that, even 20 years ago, 15 years ago, if somebody had
said, you're going to have Russia with a democratic government, elected
government -- and despite the criticisms in this year, the Russia report was
still pretty positive -- that the former Soviet bloc countries would all
become, at least the ones in Europe with a couple of exceptions, including
the one that I recently came from, would become a democracy and be moving
forward on human rights; if you had said when I joined the State Department
- when we literally had five elected governments in Latin America, and
within a year or two of that the Chilean Government became a dictatorship
and we were down to four -- and if you tried to tell anybody that, you know,
20 or 30 years from now, everything except Cuba will be an elected
government, no one would have believed you.

So, from that standpoint, I would say, yeah, things have gotten -- and
Africa. Africa, you look around now, that South Africa managed to make a
transition from a minority apartheid government repressing the majority of
the citizens in the country, to where it's a very open, functioning
democracy.

Yeah, there are problems in each one of those regions. You've got Zimbabwe
right next door to South Africa. You've got Venezuela having problems in
Latin America. You've got Colombia that's had a democratically elected
government all along but has got a horrible insurgency that's going on,
where they're fighting people from both sides of the spectrum. They've got
three different terrorist groups that they're battling all at once there.
You've got, you know, cocaleros bringing down the government in Bolivia.
You've got problems like that in Peru.

So you can look at all the problems and say, "Oh, things are awful." But
when you think about where we were 20 or 30 years ago, and any of us sitting
down then, we couldn't have dreamed of what's happened.

So my view is, it's time to keep dreaming and trying to make that become
reality, and that requires you just have to work away at it every day and we
have to work together. And it's not just the developed countries. We do
work very closely with the EU, for example, because we have common values
there.

But we find ourselves increasingly working with -- and it's often much more
effective to work with -- countries in the various regions of the world, and
the more recent democracies. They have many more lessons to show to
countries that are struggling to come out of dictatorships than perhaps we
do. I've seen this, like in Belarus when I was there -- if you start
talking about the way things are in the United States or France or Finland
or something, people [respond]-- it's so far away, it's so impossible to
think that you could ever get that and they just say, "Oh, that couldn't
be."

But if you point next door to Lithuania, which they know 10 or 15 years ago
was in the same shape and maybe even a little less good shape than they
were, now Latvia, Lithuania are suddenly very booming democratic countries,
but the people who are there in power are the people who helped bring it
about. I see in Belarus, too, people looking at Russia now. And what they
find attractive about Russia is not nostalgia for the Soviet past. It's
that they're saying, "Gee, in Russia, people are able to open their own
business, and they don't have to go through 60 different bureaucracies in
order to do that. I could have my own business. Why can't I have that?"

And so there's a lot of lessons there to be taught. I think, you know, some
of the democracies in Africa have some very good lessons to teach to
countries that haven't come out of that yet.

So that's the kind of thing that I think we want to see brought together and
we've seen some movement to that end with the Community of Democracies that
held a conference in Seoul in the year before last.

A PARTICIPANT: In Miami.

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Yeah. And then in Miami, and then in 2005, under Chilean
sponsorship, [it] will be holding another big conference. But this is a
group of a little over 100 countries now -- and many of them new democracies
-- that are working together to try to find ways to be helpful to countries
that are trying to make that transition and trying to improve their records.

And so, as you can tell, I'm excited about future. Even if I've been around
a while, I'm still looking at that and thinking there's a lot more to do and
a lot of optimism about the ability to do it.

QUESTION: Emad Mekay with Inter Press Service and also with Asharq Al-Awsat
Newspaper, Saudi Arabia.] Okay. I'll make them quick. Just a quick
follow-up, sir, here on the previous question. How about two or three years
ago, how would you rate the improvements in human rights? Is it better, is
it worse?

Thank you.

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: I'd say better. I'd say better. I mean, it's hard.
You'd have to sit down with a scorecard, because some countries have gotten
significantly better and some have gotten significantly worse doing that
period. But my guess is that if you netted it out, you're going to be
significantly better on a worldwide basis.

And even on a regional basis, too, I think in every region the trend has
been -- I mean, look at the Middle East. There's a lot of improvement
there. People thought there would never be any change and things are
changing. Not as fast as we'd like, certainly not as fast as we'd like, not
everywhere. A lot of abuses still, but it's moving. Latin America, moving.
Africa, moving. It's hard to find a region -- even in Central Asia, you've
got a few that are making some baby steps. So it's not a bleak picture at
all.

QUESTION: Should all countries be judged on the same standards, given the
differences in the social dynamics and economic conditions?

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Yes, is the short answer. And I say that in the sense
that there's one standard for democracy and one standard for human rights.
There's no excuse for torturing people, no matter how developed or
undeveloped you are. Torture is bad; it shouldn't be done. It's prohibited
by international law and there's no excuse for it.

I've never seen a country that was able to advance economically and
developmentally by being a harsh, police-state dictatorship. The ones that
break out are the ones that open up their systems, have more freedom and so
on, both economic and political freedom.

So, in that sense, no, there shouldn't be, in my view, any difference, and I
don't think there is. This report, by the way, when we go through, we asked
exactly the same questions of every country. When we ask our embassies,
were there credible reports of torture in this country last year? We asked
that question whether it's Australia or Britain or France or whether it's
Belarus or Cuba or anything else. They get exactly identical questions for
each country. And we try to make them so the answer is either yes or no.
There were --

A PARTICIPANT: Or gay rights -- were gay rights --

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Yeah, and gay rights are covered. We don't ask it as a
specific question, but we, in our guidance, we say that if there are
incidents where gays are being [subjected to] systematic discrimination, it
falls under systematic discrimination against minorities.

But where the capabilities of countries come in is on a couple of things.
First, there's social systems and political systems. There's not one
cookie-cutter approach to democratic political systems. There are some
things that they have in common, you know, periodic elections, open press
and that kind of thing that we really need to have a system be democratic.
But whether it's a parliamentary system or constitutional monarchy or
presidential system, all of those can work. There are all kinds of models.

The other thing that you obviously have to take into account is whether --
for example, prison conditions. A country that is really impoverished has a
hard time having good conditions in its prisons.

So when we say conditions in the prisons were harsh or bad or something like
that, that isn't saying we're questioning the good faith or the good will of
the government. We're reporting a fact; they were harsh and bad. And,
actually, in some cases, that causes us, when we're looking at our
assistance programs, to say, well, maybe this is an area in which we should
help that, if that government wants to improve those conditions, we should
help them do it because they don't have enough resources themselves. And I
say we, the international community, not just the United States.

So the capabilities definitely come into the picture. But it's not because
it's -- it can be -- you can look at those to say it's understandable why
this country has not yet been able to achieve more in this area or that area
because of resources, because of the weakness of institutions that take time
to strengthen and all of that.

But what we're really looking for in making our judgments in policy terms
is: Are the people in power in the country trying to improve those things?
Are they looking for assistance? Are they trying to generate their own
resources that way? Or are they trying to suppress their own people and
keep them impoverished and repressed so that they don't change them out of
control? That's the kind of intention thing we're looking for.

But when we look -- when we're writing -- this isn't a report that's making
judgments. It's a report reporting facts. And there may be different
reasons that the facts are the way they are. Could be an insurgent group is
doing something that makes it almost impossible for the -- the government
gets blamed, in a sense, even if the people doing the killing are somebody
that's outside the government's control.

What we're reporting is that the government doesn't have enough control to
be able to stop bad guys from going around and murdering people. But that
isn't necessarily a judgment saying, this is a bad government. It's saying
it's a government that's got a lot of problems it's trying to contend with.

MR. DENIG: Thank you very much, Mr. Ambassador. Thank you, ladies and
gentlemen.

AMBASSADOR KOZAK: Thank you all. Pleasure. See you all.