US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressed Central Asian governments on Tuesday to expand democratic freedoms, saying countries which quash human rights only make themselves less competitive on the global stage. Launching a tour amid uproar over the leak of a huge cache of classified US diplomatic cables by a whistleblower website, Clinton also said she was committed to Internet freedom.
She said it was important that "governments don't overreact" to information that they do not like being aired in public. Clinton brought her strong human rights message to Kazakhstan, which on December 1-2 will host a summit of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) amid withering criticism of its own rights record.
"No country can be fully free unless human rights defenders are given their rights," Clinton told a university audience in Astana, Kazakhstan's futuristic new capital. "If you want to be a successful country in the 21st century, eventually you are going to have to accept that you must do more for human rights."
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