A United Nations human rights body told Washington on Friday that any ”secret detention” centres for terrorism suspects it operates abroad violates international law and should be shut immediately.
Saying it has ”credible and uncontested” reports of such jails, the UN Human Rights Committee said the United States appears to have been detaining people ”secretly and in secret places for months and years”.
”The state party should immediately abolish all secret detention,” it said, echoing a similar demand in May by the UN Committee against Torture.
In its findings on US observance of the UN’s main political rights treaty, the committee said the International Committee of the Red Cross must be given access to anybody held during armed conflict.
The UN body also expressed concern at the acknowledged past use of interrogation techniques such as prolonged stress positions and sleep deprivation that could be seen as torture.
While welcoming assurances that they are no longer used, it said it is worried the US does not seem to see them as violations of international law. It also questioned the ”impartiality and effectiveness” of investigations into abuse.
”We consider that the major violations were to do with the fight against terrorism,” said French magistrate Christine Chanet, who chairs the committee of 18 internationally recognised independent experts.
Moral weight
The committee, whose opinions carry moral, not legal, weight, rejected Washington’s argument that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights only applies on US soil.
A report last month for the Council of Europe, the European human rights watchdog, said more than 20 European states had colluded in a web of secret CIA jails and flight transfers of terrorism suspects from Asia to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.
In reply to the committee’s 39 recommendations, Washington stuck to its view about territorial limits.
”We can understand the committee’s desire to have the convention apply outside the territory … but we must accept … the way it was written, not the way the committee wishes it to be,” said State Department legal adviser John Bellinger.
Washington accused the committee of spending too much time on the US.
”The recent committee conclusions on North Korea were about half the length of that on the United States,” the US mission to the UN in Geneva said in a statement.
The UN treaty lays down individual rights, including the right to equality before the law and protection against torture and inhumane treatment as well as from arbitrary arrest.
The committee asked the US to respond to its comments within a year. Asked what would happen if Washington took no notice, Chanet said: ”There is a strong chance that they will ignore many of the recommendations. They are so certain about their position [but] we can always hope for a change of attitude.”
The next formal US review is not due until 2010, but the latest US report to the committee was seven years late. — Reuters
Additional reporting by Laura MacInnis