The United Nations’s special rapporteur on torture has turned down an offer to visit Guantánamo Bay after the United States refused to grant the UN’s experts unfettered access to the prison.
The UN’s panel of experts said that restrictions imposed by the US would make it impossible to judge the conditions under which around 500 detainees from the war on terror are being held at the camp.
”We deeply regret that the United States government did not accept the standard terms of reference for a credible, objective and fair assessment of the situation of the detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility,” they said in a statement.
”These terms include the ability to conduct private interviews with detainees.”
Special rapporteur Martin Nowak said that the US’s stance compared poorly with that of China, which had allowed unrestricted access to its jails.
The announcement comes as 25 former Guantánamo detainees gather in London to discuss torture, secret prisons and rendition — the practice of sending suspects for interrogation to countries with poor human rights records — at a conference sponsored by Amnesty International and Reprieve.
Amnesty spokesperson Neil Durkin said the absence of full scrutiny at the camp heightened the risk of abuse.
”If the Americans say they’re running a clean operation why do they not allow the UN specialist on torture to visit?”
He also warned that other abuses could be ongoing in less prominent prisons.
”Guantánamo is a very visible symbol of what’s gone wrong in the way the US fights the war on terror, but we’re concerned that that’s the visible tip of a much bigger iceberg,” he said.
The Washington Post reported earlier this month that detainees are being held in CIA-run secret prisons in eastern Europe, part of a worldwide network of ”black prisons” operated by the US’s army and intelligence services.
But European governments have made little diplomatic noise about the issue, according to US officials. Washington’s regional diplomat for Europe, Daniel Fried, said on Thursday that it had not been a major subject during his tour of Europe last week, although he acknowledged there was a public debate over US detainee policies. ”I have not heard a great deal from my European colleagues,” he told reporters.
It was revealed this week that the US has detained more than 83 000 people in its four-year war on terror, of which 14 500 remain in jail. About 108 are known to have died in US army and CIA custody, including 26 deaths which have been investigated as homicides.
On Tuesday, the US senate passed an amendment allowing Guantánamo detainees to appeal the verdicts of courts martial to America’s federal courts, although proposals to allow detainees to challenge their indefinite detention were rejected.
The amendment comes as part of a defence bill sponsored by Republican senator John McCain to outlaw torture of detainees in US custody. The bill is opposed by the White House, which wants to exempt the CIA from the provisions banning torture.
A Bahraini man held in Guantánamo tried to kill himself on Monday by pulling sutures out of an arm wound he inflicted on himself last month, according to court documents filed in Washington.
Juma’a Muhammad al-Dossary, who has been held in Guantánamo since February 2002, has made eight previous suicide attempts and has been on hunger strike for several weeks in protest at the US’s refusal to free him along with a group of Bahraini prisoners recently released from the camp. – Guardian Unlimited