Guantanamo deadline passes, Australia should help resettle detainees
21 January 2010, 03:23PM
With the US failing to meet its self-imposed deadline for closing the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, the Australian Government should help to end this human rights scandal by resettling some of the detainees.
The day after his inauguration, US President Barack Obama committed to close the facility by 22 January, 2010. Disappointingly, just weeks beforehand, he announced he would not meet this deadline. The failure to live up to this promise has ensured that Guantánamo will remain synonymous with injustice well into the second year of the Obama administration.
“Australia must call for the prompt closure of Guantánamo Bay,” said Amnesty International spokesperson Katie Wood. “It should also help to remove one of the stumbling blocks for closing the facility by offering humanitarian protection to some of the detainees who are cleared for release but cannot be returned to their own countries for fear that they would suffer torture or persecution there.”
Several countries have already led the way in helping to close the detention facility, with former detainees who could not go back to their own countries currently living in France, Belgium, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Palau, Bermuda and the UK.
“The U.S. has the primary responsibility for rectifying its rights violations, but all members of the international community, including Australia, have an obligation to uphold and restore human rights,” said Katie Wood.
“There are around 50 men who have been cleared for release but are still detained in Guantánamo Bay. For these men, there can be no more excuses,” said Katie Wood. “They remain detained for the sole reason that they have no safe place to go. They have been essentially abandoned at Guantánamo. The plight of these men poses one of the most significant obstacles to the closure of the detention centre.”
Now in its ninth year of operation, Guantánamo Bay is a symbol of the human rights abuses that have occurred in the name of the so-called ‘war on terror’. There are 198 men still detained in the prison, the majority of whom have never been charged with any crime by the US authorities. These detainees must be charged and tried in a US federal court, without recourse to the death penalty, or released.
The US has made some limited progress over the past year in ending human rights violations that resulted from its counter terror policies. The administration issued an Executive Order that ended the CIA's programme of long-term secret detention and guaranteed access to the ICRC to detainees held by the USA. This Executive Order also directed an end to the euphemistically named “enhanced interrogation techniques” as used in the secret detention programme.
However, Amnesty International is concerned about reliance on the Army Field Manual, which contains loopholes for torture and other ill-treatment. Also, the order did not end the practice of rendition and leaves open the possibility for the CIA to use detention facilities on a short-term, transitory basis, or to use foreign-controlled facilities to detain and interrogate individuals (proxy detention).
The US has yet to commit to refuse any information obtained under torture or other ill-treatment in judicial proceedings, except against an alleged perpetrator of the abuse. The administration has suspended military commissions, but it must now permanently end them.
The US administration must also seek accountability for human rights violations committed under the so-called ‘war on terror’. This would include holding an independent commission of inquiry into US detention and interrogation practices; criminal investigations into the programmes of rendition and secret detention; and rejecting impunity for crimes under international law such as torture and other ill-treatment of detainees, and enforced disappearance.
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Comments
Comments are submitted by members of the public and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of Amnesty International Australia. If you find a comment objectionable please contact the web editor.
Paige Robin -Willow
21 January 2010, 09:50PM
I really don’t see what the delay is in closing the prison. A promise is a promise, and i wouldn’t have thought that this was any exception.
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