BY FRANK DAVIES

 WASHINGTON -- Governments in the hemisphere are gradually doing more to
 protect human rights and the activists who monitor abuses, Human Rights Watch
 has found, with several prominent exceptions:

 Colombia, Cuba, Peru and Mexico.

 The rights-monitoring organization, known for its reliability and lack of ideology,
 issued its annual report Thursday on human rights conditions around the globe,
 focusing on 68 countries in a 517-page document.

 ``The most startling development [in 1999] was the decline of national sovereignty
 as an obstacle to international actions directed at crimes against humanity,'' said
 Kenneth Roth, the group's executive director.

 He noted that international intervention against ``gross human rights crimes'' from
 Kosovo to East Timor showed that sovereignty ``cannot be used as an excuse to
 avoid human rights commitments.''

 Roth also praised efforts to prosecute former Chilean Gen. Augusto Pinochet and
 others accused of genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda as a ``triumph of the principle
 of universal jurisdiction'' in cases of crimes against humanity.

 One of the most promising developments in Latin America, the group found, is
 that a growing network of rights groups and community and religious
 organizations is able to operate with fewer obstacles from governments. But the
 report highlighted exceptions:

 Colombia: Two human rights defenders were killed and many others threatened,
 and several groups were forced to close their doors under threat from paramilitary
 groups, which were responsible for about 78 percent of the rights violations in that
 war-torn country.

 Roth warned that Colombian officials were not doing enough to root out military
 and security leaders who were committing abuses, even as the United States is
 preparing a massive aid package for Colombia in its guerrilla war.

 Cuba: Fidel Castro's government was criticized for its ``systematic repression of
 civil society.''

 The report found: ``Harassment and prosecution of dissidents coupled with a
 continuing refusal to grant amnesty to hundreds of political prisoners
 demonstrated Cuba's increasingly repressive human rights conditions in 1999.''

 Peru: The report described President Alberto Fujimori as ``the region's most
 authoritarian elected leader'' for weakening political and judicial institutions and
 refusing to comply with rulings by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
 Torture of suspects in police custody allegedly continued to be widespread.

 Mexico: Much of the criminal justice system is corrupt, the report found, with
 widespread rights violations including torture and arbitrary detention, despite a
 high-level initiative to protect rights.

 The annual report also criticized the ``terrible state of the administration of justice''
 in Guatemala, citing the stalemated investigation into the murder of Bishop Juan
 Gerardi, and the mounting political violence and breakdown of civil society in Haiti.

 Conditions in the United States were criticized. The report cited several police
 brutality cases in New York and the deaths and injuries to inmates in the Florida
 prison system.

                     Copyright 1999 Miami Herald