Are you suggesting it's worse to do something to "your own people" than to do it to "other people"?

Well, yes, in the sense that technically it's 'their' government. It's 'worse' when those who supposedly should protect you, instead abuse you, similar to how the BLM protests grew out of outrage about police brutality, even though it is a vanishingly small amount of the violence minority communities suffer.

From an outsider's perspective on human rights, would it be worse if a government mishandles citizens than if they mishandle foreigners?

I believe it really doesn't matter at all if it is actually about human rights, they're human in either case.

Of course it is.

Is it worse for the government to bomb a foreign country, or to bomb its own people? Of course they're both bad, but there's a reason the international community reacted one way to Syria and one way to the US invasion of Afghanistan.

> but there's a reason the international community reacted one way to Syria and one way to the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Yes, Syria has no nukes and no military power. That's the extent of the why. Russia, for examples, has nukes and military power, and look at what happened in Grosny and the international community.

But all of that is besides the point, of course. It's allegedly about human rights, not about only killing & torturing people as long as they're not citizens of your country, the secret law of civilized society.

From the point of view of international law, bombing a foreign country is far worse.

The "crime of aggression" is one of the most serious violations of international law that exists. One of the foundational principles of the post-WWII order is that countries cannot go to war against other countries, except in self-defense (very narrowly construed) or with permission from the UN Security Council.

What countries do within their own borders is much more their own business.

> there's a reason the international community reacted one way to Syria and one way to the US invasion of Afghanistan.

The reason is simple. Syria is not a powerful country, but the US is. Everyone recognized that the invasion of Iraq was aggression, and therefore illegal under international law. Nobody was willing to do anything about it, because the US was then the world's sole superpower.

Added to that, what happened to:

"Injustice to one is injustice to all"