Is such criticism fair or valid? A report issued last week by Human Rights Watch may help answer this question. Few governments invoke principles of human rights as much as the United States government does. By its own rhetoric, the U.S. sets a higher standard for human rights compliance, which is logically used by its critics to evaluate its record.

At least since the Carter Administration, the U.S. has employed human rights compliance or lack thereof as a key element in its foreign policy, or at least public pronouncements about its friends and adversaries, in varying degrees.

Nowadays, the U.S. probably has the largest human rights section in its foreign affairs bureaucracy. The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor is an important part of the State Department, headed these days by Michael Posner, a former human rights lawyer and head of Human Rights First, a well-known human rights organization based in New York.

The division produces the controversial annual “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” which provides meticulous details about human rights infractions around the world, but nevertheless provokes criticism for using different standards for different countries.