The first thought that struck me when reading the latest compendium of global human rights abuses was why pick on the White House? Yes, Abu Ghraib was a shameful episode. The insistence of Dick Cheney, the vice-president, that US intelligence agencies be allowed to flout laws against the inhumane treatment of detainees is as inexplicable as it is tawdry. And only this week I heard a senior official from George W. Bush’s first administration say that the simple answer to the problem of Guantánamo Bay was to shut it down.

Why, though, did the grim dossier published by Human Rights Watch* this week not start with the ethnic cleansing and systematic murder, torture and repression practised elsewhere in the world? Surely this brave guardian of standards of human behaviour could have alighted first on, say, the daily brutality in Darfur and atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Chechnya? Or, since we all seem transfixed by its re-emergence as a global power, why not take a hard look at China?