The United States has signed and ratified the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, which prohibits arbitrary detention and ensures due process rights for those detained. The United States has also a signed and ratified of the Third Geneva Convention regarding the laws of war and the treatment of prisoners of war. These are two of the treaties that the United States has been accused of violating in the detentions in Guantanamo and of US citizens declared "enemy combatants" in the United States.
Despite a major international outcry and expert condemnation of US government policy, hundreds of people of around 35 different nationalities remain held in a legal black hole at the US Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, many without access to any court, legal counsel or family visits. Denied their rights under international law and held in conditions which may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, the detainees face severe psychological distress. There have been numerous suicide attempts.
The detainees, a few of them children, are strapped, shackled and blindfolded, into transport planes. Some are forced to urinate and defecate on themselves during the long flights to an island military base. In this offshore prison camp they are held incommunicado in tiny cells, denied access to lawyers, relatives or the courts, and subjected to repeated interrogations and a punitive regime aimed at encouraging their "cooperation". A presidential order announces plans to try some of the detainees in front of executive bodies with the power to hand down death sentences against which there would be no right of appeal to any court.
Would the USA tolerate this treatment of its citizens by another government? Would the international community accept this threat to the rule of law and human rights? Surely not, and yet the USA continues to perpetrate just such abuses in the far from hypothetical Guantánamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, where almost 550 detainees of more than 30 nationalities remain detained without charge or trial. On 11 January 2005, the Guantánamo prison will enter its fourth year. In its more than 1,000 days of executive detentions, Guantánamo has become a symbol of a government's attempt to put itself above the law. The example it sets is of a world where basic human rights are negotiable rather than universal. Such a world, although built in the name of national security, is dangerous to us all.
As more evidence surfaces that the abuse of Guantánamo detainees has been widespread, it is ever more urgent to end the plight of the detainees. US authorities must bring all detainees to trial, in full accordance with international law and standards, or else release them immediately and unconditionally.
You can find more information in the links below.
Abu Naser Bablu.
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