BERLIN — The advocacy group Human Rights Watch sharply criticized international powers Tuesday for the way they are dealing with the civil war in Syria, saying that the desire to bring President Bashar Assad’s government to the negotiating table should not become a pretext for failing to protect civilians caught in the conflict, which has claimed more than 100,000 lives.
The group included the criticism in an annual accounting of human rights records around the world Tuesday, the day before an international peace conference on the Syrian conflict was set to begin in Montreux, Switzerland.
Separately, a team of legal and forensic specialists commissioned by the government of Qatar said Monday that thousands of photographs showing scarred, emaciated corpses offered direct evidence of mass torture by Syrian government forces.
Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, which has its headquarters in New York, said the images were consistent with what his organization had seen when it visited detention centers in Syria. The photographs, provided to the Syrian opposition by a man who described himself as a defector from Assad’s security forces, highlight the importance of opening Syrian detention facilities to international inspection, he said.
Speaking at a press conference in Berlin, Roth said that Western governments, and especially the United States, had not spoken out strongly enough about the violence for fear that it could endanger peace talks.
“It is essential that the mass atrocities being committed in Syria be a parallel focus of any diplomatic effort,” Roth said. He called for an end to the indiscriminate killing of civilians and an opening of Syria’s borders for humanitarian aid. “We cannot afford to wait for the distant prospect of a peace accord before the killing of 5,000 Syrians a month comes to an end.”
In addition to Syria, the group’s report also condemned what it called “lip service” paid to democracy by the governments of Egypt and Myanmar.
Human Rights Watch said the rest of the world had done too little to intervene in Syria to protect civilians, in contrast with the efforts mounted by France, the United States, and the United Nations in African countries like the Central African Republic and South Sudan.
President Obama’s record on national security issues was criticized in the report, from the continued existence of the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to what the group called the unlawful killing of civilians through drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
The group also faulted the “virtually unchecked mass electronic surveillance” that was revealed by documents released by Edward J. Snowden.