They would no longer be able to detain tribesman without charge or trial for three years. Instead, detainees would have to be indicted or released by officials within 24 hours of arrest and have the right to bail. Girls and boys younger than 16 would no longer be liable to arrest under collective punishment of a clan.

hrw report on history and present of guantanamo bay

democrats and israel:
During the five weeks of fighting, 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 Israeli civilians were killed. It was the Lebanese who suffered the most, however. Massive Israeli bombardments took the lives of more than 1,100 people, the vast majority of whom were innocent civilians, and caused more than $3.5 billion in damage to the country’s civilian infrastructure and widespread environmental damage.
(...) Yet Congress continues to justify last summer’s widespread attacks on civilian targets by the U.S.-supplied Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) by claiming that Hezbollah used the Lebanese civilian population as “human shields,” thereby seeking to protect America’s closest Middle East ally from its moral and legal responsibility for its war crimes. For example, on April 25, the House of Representatives passed by a near-unanimous voice vote a resolution (H. Res. 125) claiming that “throughout the summer of 2006 conflict with the State of Israel, Hezbollah forces utilized human shields to protect themselves from counterattacks by Israeli forces.” In defense of the Bush administration’s controversial backing of Israel’s 35-day assault on Lebanon, the Democratic-led House cited President George W. Bush’s claim that “Hezbollah terrorists used Lebanese civilians as human shields, sacrificing the innocent in an effort to protect themselves from Israeli response” and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s assertion that “`Hezbollah and its sponsors have brought devastation upon the people of Lebanon, … exploiting them as human shields.”
(...) Investigations by independent human rights groups during last summer’s fighting did not find clear evidence that Hezbollah deliberately used civilians to shield their personnel or equipment from Israeli strikes. For example, a detailed study published at the end of the fighting in August by Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that they had found “no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack.” Similarly, Amnesty International, in a well-documented report published in November observed, “While the presence of Hizbullah’s fighters and short-range weapons within civilian areas is not contested, this in itself is not conclusive evidence of intent to use civilians as ‘human shields’, any more than the presence of Israeli soldiers in a kibbutz is in itself evidence of the same war crime.”
(...) In any case, the vast majority of Israeli strikes in civilian areas were nowhere near Hezbollah military activity. As Human Rights Watch noted, “In dozens of attacks, Israeli forces struck an area with no apparent military target. In some cases, the timing and intensity of the attack, the absence of a military target, as well as return strikes on rescuers, suggest that Israeli forces deliberately targeted civilians.” Similarly, Amnesty International reported that Israeli forces “carried out indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on a large scale,” including “those on civilian infrastructure” and “direct attacks on civilian objects.” Furthermore, they reported that “These attacks seem to have been aimed at inflicting a form of collective punishment on Lebanon’s people” and that “based on the available evidence and the absence of an adequate or any explanation from the Israeli authorities for so many attacks by their forces causing civilian deaths and destruction, when no evidence of Hizbullah military activities was apparent, it seems clear that Israeli forces consistently failed to adopt necessary precautionary measures.”
(...) My efforts to ascertain where members of Congress get information to back up their defense of Israeli war crimes have revealed a rather startling inclination to rely on rather dubious right-wing sources for information. For example, following a speech in March, in which Senator Barack Obama repeated the myth that Hezbollah had used “innocent people as shields,” I contacted his spokesman as to what evidence the presidential hopeful had to make such charges. He referred me to a report by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies, a right-wing Israeli think tank headed by the former chief of the Mossad which maintains close ties to the Israeli government. Despite repeated requests, Obama’s office was unable to provide any other source supporting the senator’s charge. This underscores serious concerns among human rights activists that Obama and other leading Democrats, like President Bush, have the same propensity to believe the findings of ideologically-driven right-wing think tanks above those of objective scholarship, reputable journalists, or principled human rights groups and other nonpartisan organizations.
(...) A recent HRW report notes how “Human Rights Watch and Israeli and Palestinian organizations documented numerous cases of Israeli forces using Palestinian civilians as human shields.” Similarly, Amnesty International has reported how Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank “have often used Palestinians effectively as human shields, endangering their lives in violation of international humanitarian law. There have been no Congressional resolutions condemning Israel’s use of human shields, however. Congressional Democrats essentially share the Bush administration’s practice that if you are perceived as an adversary, your crimes will be exaggerated or even manufactured, while it you are perceived as an ally, your crimes will be covered up.
(...) Perhaps the ultimate reason is that the Democrats’ agenda is essentially the same as the Republican administration and their Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill: to cover up for abuses of international humanitarian law by the United States and its allies and discredit human rights organizations that challenge these practices as a means of enhancing the hegemonic role of the United States in the Middle East and elsewhere.

human rights as handmaiden to world order:
On Thursday the council’s presidency will pass to Serbia. Serbia is not the only nation in Europe involved in human rights abuses. But it is distinguished by the fact that its failures are uncontroversial. Everyone from Human Rights Watch to President Bush has urged its government to hand over Ratko Mladic – the general responsible for the Srebrenica massacre – to the tribunal in the Hague. To decide that this country is unfit to run the Council of Europe looks uncomplicated and free from political cost. If European countries can’t find the courage to act against Serbia, they can’t find the courage to act against anyone. Human rights become a dead letter.
(...) There is scarcely a government in Europe which does not have something to hide. The UK, Germany, Italy, Macedonia and even Sweden have been assisting the CIA’s programme of “extraordinary rendition”: kidnapping people and delivering them to states which will torture them on America’s behalf(7). Poland and Romania appear to have allowed the US to use secret detention centres on their soil to process them. Austria, Germany and the UK rely on worthless diplomatic assurances to justify handing refugees to governments which torture their prisoners(8). Poland warns that “teachers who reveal their homosexuality will be fired from work”(9). France supports African genocidaires. Spain repatriates unaccompanied children(10). Ukrainian police torture sex workers and force them to confess to crimes they did not commit(11). The United Kingdom bans peaceful protest and continues to occupy the country it illegally invaded. Lift a stone to throw at Serbia anywhere in Europe and you will find something unpleasant cowering there. Better to leave it on the ground. The price of being left alone by other states is the tolerance of mass murder.
(...) If you want to know the value of an institution, you need only imagine what the world would be like if it didn’t exist. If the Council of Europe were dissolved, would anyone suffer, except for the people it employs? The European Court would be missed. But the rest of it? Thanks to the member states’ agreement to ignore each other’s abuses, it is, at the moment, completely useless.