[JURIST] Human Rights Watch [advocacy website] has released its 2005 human rights report [full text] surveying human rights developments in more than 60 countries in 2004. The report says that worldwide system for protecting human rights was significantly weakened in 2004 by the crisis in Darfur [BBC Q&A] and the Abu Ghraib [JURIST Hot Topic] scandal:

No one would equate the two, yet each, in its own way, has had an insidious effect. One involves indifference in the face of the worst imaginable atrocities, the other is emblematic of a powerful government flouting a most basic prohibition. One presents a crisis that threatens many lives, the other a case of exceptionalism that threatens the most fundamental rules. The vitality of the global defense of human rights depends on a firm response to each on stopping the Sudanese government's slaughter in Darfur and on changing the policy decisions behind the US government's torture and mistreatment of detainees.