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William Fisher,
Foreign policy and human rights experts appear to agree with a United Nations report calling on the US to shut down its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — but most believe that simply closing it misses a larger point: What to do with the prisoners?
The report released on Feb. 16 found that US treatment of Guantanamo detainees violates their rights to physical and mental health and, in some cases, constitutes torture. It urges the US to close the facility and bring the captives to trial on US territory, charging that Washington’s justification for the continued detention is a distortion of international law.
Compiled by five UN experts who interviewed former prisoners, detainees’ lawyers and families, and US officials, the report is the result of an 18-month investigation.
While the UN team was refused access to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, it concluded that the violent force-feeding of hunger strikers, incidents of excessive violence used in transporting prisoners and combinations of interrogation techniques “must be assessed as amounting to torture.”
“We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the US government,” said Manfred Nowak, the UN special rapporteur on torture and one of the experts. “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.”
Nowak, a member of the International Commission of Jurists, is professor of constitutional law and human rights at the University of Vienna and director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights (BIM). Since 1996, he has served as judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo.
Human rights and legal advocates hope the UN’s conclusions will add weight to similar findings by rights groups and the European Parliament. Prof. Erwin Chemerinsky of the Duke University Law School shares that hope. He said: “I believe that the existence of the prison in Guantanamo and the treatment of the detainees there violates international law. However, if the base at Guantanamo should be closed, it is essential that something worse not replace it. For example, it would be much worse if the prisoners are then transferred to prisons in foreign countries beyond American courts’ jurisdiction.”
This view was echoed by Gabor Rona, international legal director of Human Rights First (HRF), a New York-based advocacy group. He says: “Whether or not Guantanamo stays open or is closed addresses only one symptom of a larger question: What will happen to the detainees? If closing GITMO simply means shipping the detainees off to other places and fates where their rights continue to be violated, that would be no step at all.”
Barbara J. Olshansky, director counsel of the Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), said, “With each day (GITMO) remains open, it presents a very ugly picture to the world of the US decision to cast aside the rule of law and trample the most fundamental human rights.”
She added, “Guantanamo has become the symbol for our country’s decision to deny human dignity. At the same time, however, we remain very concerned about the actions the US might take if it were to close the base. It has taken a great deal of effort to ensure that detainees are not transferred to indefinite detention or to detention under torture from Guantanamo.”
According to Jonathan Turley of Georgetown University and a widely recognized authority on US Constitutional and international law, “Closing Gitmo will mean little if the underlying abuses continue at a dozen less visible locations.”
The report focuses on the US government’s legal basis for the detentions as described in its 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. 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.”
But the UN team concluded that there had been insufficient due process to determine whether the more than 750 people who had been 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.
The report said the simultaneous use of several interrogation techniques — prolonged solitary confinement, exposure to extreme temperatures, noise and light; forced shaving and other techniques that exploit religious beliefs or cause intimidation and humiliation — constituted inhumane treatment and, in some cases, reached the threshold of torture.
Foreign policy and human rights experts appear to agree with a United Nations report calling on the US to shut down its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — but most believe that simply closing it misses a larger point: What to do with the prisoners?
The report released on Feb. 16 found that US treatment of Guantanamo detainees violates their rights to physical and mental health and, in some cases, constitutes torture. It urges the US to close the facility and bring the captives to trial on US territory, charging that Washington’s justification for the continued detention is a distortion of international law.
Compiled by five UN experts who interviewed former prisoners, detainees’ lawyers and families, and US officials, the report is the result of an 18-month investigation.
While the UN team was refused access to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, it concluded that the violent force-feeding of hunger strikers, incidents of excessive violence used in transporting prisoners and combinations of interrogation techniques “must be assessed as amounting to torture.”
“We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the US government,” said Manfred Nowak, the UN special rapporteur on torture and one of the experts. “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.”
Nowak, a member of the International Commission of Jurists, is professor of constitutional law and human rights at the University of Vienna and director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights (BIM). Since 1996, he has served as judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo.
Human rights and legal advocates hope the UN’s conclusions will add weight to similar findings by rights groups and the European Parliament. Prof. Erwin Chemerinsky of the Duke University Law School shares that hope. He said: “I believe that the existence of the prison in Guantanamo and the treatment of the detainees there violates international law. However, if the base at Guantanamo should be closed, it is essential that something worse not replace it. For example, it would be much worse if the prisoners are then transferred to prisons in foreign countries beyond American courts’ jurisdiction.”
This view was echoed by Gabor Rona, international legal director of Human Rights First (HRF), a New York-based advocacy group. He says: “Whether or not Guantanamo stays open or is closed addresses only one symptom of a larger question: What will happen to the detainees? If closing GITMO simply means shipping the detainees off to other places and fates where their rights continue to be violated, that would be no step at all.”
Barbara J. Olshansky, director counsel of the Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), said, “With each day (GITMO) remains open, it presents a very ugly picture to the world of the US decision to cast aside the rule of law and trample the most fundamental human rights.”
She added, “Guantanamo has become the symbol for our country’s decision to deny human dignity. At the same time, however, we remain very concerned about the actions the US might take if it were to close the base. It has taken a great deal of effort to ensure that detainees are not transferred to indefinite detention or to detention under torture from Guantanamo.”
According to Jonathan Turley of Georgetown University and a widely recognized authority on US Constitutional and international law, “Closing Gitmo will mean little if the underlying abuses continue at a dozen less visible locations.”
The report focuses on the US government’s legal basis for the detentions as described in its 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. 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.”
But the UN team concluded that there had been insufficient due process to determine whether the more than 750 people who had been 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.
The report said the simultaneous use of several interrogation techniques — prolonged solitary confinement, exposure to extreme temperatures, noise and light; forced shaving and other techniques that exploit religious beliefs or cause intimidation and humiliation — constituted inhumane treatment and, in some cases, reached the threshold of torture.
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