“It is unfortunate that it took the murder of a prominent journalist to generate worldwide outrage over Riyadh’s human rights record,” Human Rights Watch said on Thursday.“It is unfortunate that it took the murder of a prominent journalist to generate worldwide outrage over Riyadh’s human rights record,” Human Rights Watch said on Thursday.The international NGO expressed itself in this way in its 29th annual world report on the situation of human rights in more than 100 countries.“But this murder alone had a mobilizing effect,” said Kenneth Roth, the organization’s executive director, at a press conference.The incident, he added, prompted many countries to impose sanctions on the Saudi government and officials, including a ban on arms sales in Riyadh.To this end, Roth praised the efforts of the governments of small European countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Ireland or Canada to investigate war crimes committed in Yemen.“At the initiative[of these countries], the Human Rights Council also rejected a vigorous attempt by Saudi Arabia to avoid a review of war crimes committed in Yemen, such as repeated bombings and the devastating encirclement of Yemeni civilians by the Riyadh-led coalition,” he stressed.Roth believes, indeed, that “when governments see political or economic benefits in the violation of rights, rights advocates can further increase the price to be paid for these abuses and reverse the cost-benefit ratio to convince these governments that repression does not pay”.

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