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KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - The United States has quietly dropped its push for major trading partner Malaysia to improve its human rights record, shamed by its own recent record at Guantanamo Bay, a U.S.-based rights group said on Wednesday
Human Rights Watch, in a report condemning Malaysia's detention without trial of people deemed security threats, quoted an unnamed U.S. State Department official as saying Washington had quit putting pressure on Malaysia by the end of 2003.
"With what we're doing in Guantanamo, we're on thin ice to push on this," the report quoted the senior State Department official as telling Human Rights Watch in December 2003.
Both Washington and Britain, once prominent critics of Malaysia's use of its Internal Security Act (ISA), have fallen silent on the issue since making preventive detention a pillar of their own crackdown on Islamic militants, the report said.
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - The United States has quietly dropped its push for major trading partner Malaysia to improve its human rights record, shamed by its own recent record at Guantanamo Bay, a U.S.-based rights group said on Wednesday
Human Rights Watch, in a report condemning Malaysia's detention without trial of people deemed security threats, quoted an unnamed U.S. State Department official as saying Washington had quit putting pressure on Malaysia by the end of 2003.
"With what we're doing in Guantanamo, we're on thin ice to push on this," the report quoted the senior State Department official as telling Human Rights Watch in December 2003.
Both Washington and Britain, once prominent critics of Malaysia's use of its Internal Security Act (ISA), have fallen silent on the issue since making preventive detention a pillar of their own crackdown on Islamic militants, the report said.
