“We very, very carefully considered all the arguments posed by the US Government … There are no conclusions that are easily drawn. But we concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and conventions on human rights and torture.”
And that is pretty much the bottom line. Although the United States has continuingly denied the use of torture by trying to change the definition of the very word, in terms of international credibility and authority, the UN Commission on Human Rights is the end arbiter.
I fully expect that the United States will soon launch a propaganda attack to sling mud on the commission or Manfred Nowak himself.
The US Administration needs to wake up and step out of the self-righteous dreamland it has been dozing in for the past decade. Even without the condemnation of the UN and the allies of the United States (i.e., its closest ally the United Kingdom), the very premise of Guantanamo Bay is ethically repugnant. One wonders how anyone can consider deliberately setting up a gaol outside the bounds US domestic law and holding prisoners indefinitely without charge could be considered tolerable in a civil democracy.
From: The Sydney Morning Herald
Shut Guantanamo prison, UN urges (excerpt)
By Maggie Farley in New York
February 14, 2006
...A DRAFT United Nations report concludes the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay violates their right to physical and mental health and, in some cases, constitutes torture.
It also urges the US to close the military prison in Cuba and bring the captives to trial on US territory, charging that Washington's justification for their continued detention is a distortion of international law.
The report, compiled by five special envoys to the UN who interviewed US officials, former prisoners, and prisoners' lawyers and families, is the product of an 18-month investigation ordered by the UN Commission on Human Rights. The team did not have access to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
The report's conclusion - that the violent force-feeding of hunger strikers, excessive violence used in transporting prisoners and combinations of interrogation techniques "must be assessed as amounting to torture" - is likely to stoke criticism of the prison...
...The report is not legally binding, but human rights advocates said they hoped it would add weight to similar findings by rights-monitoring groups and the European Parliament.
"I think the effect of this will be to revive concern about the Government's mistreatment of detainees, and to get people to take another look at the legal basis," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "There are lots of lingering questions about how do you justify holding these people."
The report focuses on the US Government's legal basis for detention of prisoners as described in a formal response to the UN inquiry: "The law of war allows the United States - and any other country engaged in combat - to hold enemy combatants without charges or access to counsel for the duration of hostilities," it said. "Detention is not an act of punishment, but of security and military necessity. It serves the purpose of preventing combatants from continuing to take up arms against the United States."
The UN team concluded there had been insufficient due process to determine whether the more than 750 people detained at Guantanamo Bay since January 2002 were "enemy combatants," and determined that the primary purpose of their confinement was for interrogation, not to prevent them from taking up arms...
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