Aung San Suu Kyi - letter to Guardian

I sent this a couple of days ago. It didn't appear, but then there hes been no correspondence in the Guardian ablut Burma.

Letters Editor
The Guardian

Your Leader on Aung San Suu Kyi's release (15th November) raises many questions. It is very clear that sanctions on Burma and elsewhere need to be targeted on the regime rather than the people.  It is also clear that we need to expose oppressive regimes worldwide on an ongoing basis. There are some 20 dictatorships in existence in the world at present. We hear about one or two high profile dictators like Than Shwe in Burma or Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe,  but the majority of authoritarians continue to defy democracy and the needs of their people away from the light of publicity.

The Green Party calls for the establishment of a Global Human Rights Index, requiring the UN to publish annually a ranked table of all governments' human rights records, so that we could tell at a glance which countries were worthy of trade and tourism.  A logical extension of this policy would set a legally enfrcible tarriff of targeted sanctions to be applied to members of a regime each time they took a recognisable step towards dictatorship. This is based on sound psychology, and would be a reasonable and legal way to avoid the abuse of human and deomocratic right caused by oppressive governments worldwide.