VIENNA, Austria - Has America lost its moral authority?

That provocative question is on the lips of politicians, human rights activists and ordinary citizens worldwide as the Iraqi prisoner abuse affair exposes damning evidence against U.S. troops.

Many wonder how the United States - embroiled in allegations that its soldiers brazenly ignored the Geneva Conventions - can credibly challenge human rights violations in places such as Haiti or Sudan.

As the scandal unfolds, the debate rages over the degree to which America's reputation and role as a global moral agent have been tarnished.

"It erodes the perception of the United States as a government with human rights as its political basis," said Aaron Rhodes, executive director of the Vienna-based International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights.

But the world shouldn't rush to judgment, and Washington deserves credit for acknowledging and condemning the abuses, Rhodes said Thursday.

"There probably isn't a single country in the world where you can't find human rights violations in prisons," he said. "The problems in Iraq are serious, of course. But the willingness to acknowledge these abuses at the very highest levels of government is a positive example that reveals the nature of the system."

Others insist the United States has lost credibility on the human rights front.

In a stinging rebuke, Austrian opposition leader Alfred Gusenbauer called on European governments Thursday to unite in condemnation of the "barbaric" humiliation and abuse of Iraqi inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Europe, the Socialist Party chairman suggested, should supplant America as an example by holding it firmly accountable for its "contempt for human beings."

By concealing early evidence of the abuse from the public, U.S. leaders "placed themselves outside the bounds of international law, their own code of justice and their much-admired constitution," The Guardian newspaper of London said this week.

Britain, too, has been pulled into the double-standard fray, with some of its soldiers also implicated in the abuse of prisoners in Iraq.

At a press conference with visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Prime Minister Tony Blair was asked if he still had the moral authority to criticize Chinese human rights abuses. He appeared exasperated and sidestepped the question.

The scandal unmasks America as a hypocrite rather than a global defender of the downtrodden, contends a human rights scholar in China, which Washington repeatedly has rebuked for abuses.

Dong Yunhu, secretary-general of the China Society for Human Rights Studies, told the official Xinhua News Agency the affair undermines the United States "as the incarnation of human rights, often criticizing other countries' problems."

Some foreign leaders, unwilling to disqualify America as a leading example of human rights and the rule of law, say they're still looking to the United States as a role model.

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, visiting Washington this week, pleaded with the Bush administration to restore the moral authority of the United States by bringing those involved to justice.

"We need the United States," Fischer said, flanked by Secretary of State Colin Powell. "We need the moral leadership of the United States. It is important for the West, for all of us."

Americans also are questioning whether the country forfeited its right to condemn abuses abroad - and, if it did, how it can reclaim the bully pulpit.

"We have to bring back the moral authority we once possessed in the world," Betty Bumpers, the wife of former Arkansas governor and U.S. senator Dale Bumpers, told a luncheon held in her honor earlier this month.

The Courier newspaper in Findlay, Ohio, conceded the scandal has opened the United States to justified criticism. But "all of America's alleged 'abuses' in Iraq cannot even begin to compare with those that take place routinely in many of the nations that so enjoy condemning us now," it said in an editorial.

Some of the week's most biting criticism came from Nelson Mandela, the former South African president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was himself imprisoned for 27 years by his country's apartheid-era regime.

Mandela scolded the United States and Britain - "two of the leading democracies, two leading nations of the free world" - for their roles in the scandal.

"Americans feel they're high and mighty - that they're the best," said Jeffrey McKenzie, a native of Gasport, N.Y., and an anti-war activist who recently moved to Austria.

"The fact is that we've had a long history of abuses, not just in Iraq. But most Americans ignore it."