Oren Dorell

USA TODAY

Russia, China and Egypt engaged in greater political repression last year, but Syria was the worst country by far when it comes to human rights, according to a State Department report released Wednesday.

“The most widespread violations of human rights were in the Middle East, where terrorism and the Syrian Civil War have caused enormous suffering,” Secretary of State John Kerry said as he presented the State Department’s 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.

Kerry said he is instructing U.S. personnel to document abuses so violators can be brought to justice.

“The United States wants those responsible for committing Human Rights abuses in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere to be held accountable,” he said.

Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2014

The U.S. response will include collection and analysis of evidence of torture and indiscriminate bombing, counseling for victims, including women and girls who’ve been used as slaves by Islamic State terrorists, “going after” that terrorist group, and seeking a political solution to the conflict in Syria, Kerry said.

The annual report lists abuses and violations in more than 200 countries.

In Syria, where the government’s lethal crackdown on peaceful democratic protests in 2011 led to civil war, the government “continued to use indiscriminate and deadly force against civilians,” according to the report.

That included air and ground-based military assaults on cities, residential areas, and civilian infrastructure, including schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, synagogues and homes, the report said.

The government killed 15,748 people last year, and Islamic State terrorists killed 2,098, the report said, which cites the Syrian Network for Human Rights. Government-linked paramilitary groups also conducted massacres, indiscriminate killings, arbitrary detentions and rape as a war tactic, the report said.

In Egypt, problems persisted in 2015, including excessive use of force by security forces, unlawful killings and torture, lack of due process and suppression of civil liberties, the State Department report said.

In China, political repression by a non-democratic Chinese Communist Party “markedly increased” last year against advocates for civil and political rights and ethnic minorities, according to the report.

This included a severe crackdown on lawyers and law firms involved in such cases, hundreds of whom were interrogated and in many cases detained in secret locations for months without charges.

Assistant Secretary of State Tom Malinowski told reporters that the Chinese crackdown is a sign of regime insecurity in the face of a better educated public.

Chinese people in the last decade “have become wealthier, their expectations have grown, and they want what people have everywhere else,” Malinowski said. “The government senses that and is cracking down.”

And in Russia, whose authoritarian political system is dominated by President Vladimir Putin, authorities did not exert enough control on security services, the report said.

Russia continued to train and supply pro-Russian forces in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine to deny due process to defendants in politically motivated cases and to discriminate against sexual and some ethnic and religious minorities.

“The government failed to take adequate steps to prosecute or punish most officials who committed abuses, resulting in a climate of impunity,” the report said.