In the first report of its kind, a team of UN human rights experts says Guantanamo Bay should be closed immediately, reports Tamam Ahmed Jama Described by the United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as the "least worst place" to hold people suspected of having links with Al-Qaeda, Guantanamo Bay has become an emblem of America's war on terror -- and, for many, everything that is wrong with it. More than four years after the first blind-folded, shackled captives arrived, a team of United Nations special rapporteurs is calling for the immediate closure of the notorious US naval base on the island of Cuba where about 500 terrorism suspects are being held. "The general conditions of detention, in particular the uncertainty about the length of detention and prolonged solitary confinement, amount to inhumane treatment and a violation of the right to health as well as a violation of the right of detainees to be treated with humanity and with respect to the inherent dignity of the human person," the five UN human rights experts said in a joint statement on 16 February. In their report, published on the same day, the special rapporteurs say: "the United States government should close the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities without further delay." They add that the terror suspects held at the base should be afforded the legal safeguards of criminal procedure enshrined in relevant international law. "The persons held at Guantanamo Bay are entitled to challenge the legality of their detention before a judicial body in accordance with Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)," the report states. "This right is currently being violated and the continuing detention of all persons held at Guantanamo Bay amounts to arbitrary detention in violation of Article 9 of the ICCPR. The United States government should either expeditiously bring all Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial, or release them without further delay." The White House quickly dismissed the report, saying it was "largely without merit" because the special rapporteurs have not visited Guantanamo Bay to see the situation on the ground for themselves. "We have patiently asked for access to Guantanamo Bay detainees for years," Paul Hunt, the UN special rapporteur on the right of detainees to health, told Al-Ahram Weekly. "It is deeply ironic that we should be criticised for not having visited Guantanamo Bay when the reason was that the US authorities denied us access to the facility and detainees." Hunt and four other human rights investigators -- including the UN special rapporteur on arbitrary detention and the UN special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment -- have been monitoring the situation in Guantanamo Bay since the first detainees were flown there in January 2002. But they have not yet visited the base due to, they say, lack of cooperation on the part of US authorities. They say they have continuously requested access to the base so that they could gather firsthand information. For the first and only time, the US government invited last October three of the five mandated rapporteurs for a one-day visit -- "to visit the Department of Defense's detention facilities [of Guantanamo Bay]." The invitation stipulated that the visit excluded meeting and conducting private interviews with the detainees. The rapporteurs said that, without private interviews with the detainees, they could not proceed with the visit. "The only reason that the US is not letting the UN experts talk to the detainees is that the administration has something to hide," Katherine Newell Bierman, counter- terrorism counsel for the US programme of Human Rights Watch, told the Weekly. "There is a wealth of information -- including consistent and credible testimonies of former detainees -- that serious human rights abuses are taking place in Guantanamo Bay. We know from the government's own documents that there were policy decisions to subject detainees to abuse." She said the experts were right not to go in the absence of private interviews with the detainees. "It would have been a sham," she said. "We know that many people have come away from Guantanamo Bay thinking that everything was alright while detainees were being abused." Bierman herself visited Guantanamo Bay last month, but in a letter she wrote while at the base, she says: "I have reached Guantanamo Bay naval base, but I am as cut off from the men imprisoned here as if I were still in Washington, DC." When she said that people have come away from Guantanamo Bay thinking that all was well, she was apparently referring to something that has been described as "stage-managed" visits. In such visits, journalists, among other visitors, are received by officials, shown around and told anything from how detainees who "cooperate" during interrogations are rewarded with McDonald's "happy meals" to how wonderful the island's weather is -- but never allowed to meet and speak to the detainees themselves. The International Committee of the Red Cross is permitted to visit the detainees, but it reports its findings only to the detaining authorities. The UN special rapporteurs based their report on testimonies of former Guantanamo Bay detainees, statements from lawyers representing some of the detainees, reports by NGOs, information contained in declassified official government documents, information provided to the rapporteurs by US officials and media reports. Hunt said that, had they not reported based on the information that was available to them, they would have failed their obligations as special rapporteurs. "We carefully collected and considered the testimonies of former detainees and information from elsewhere to arrive at an honest, fair and balanced judgement," he said. "What were we meant to do? Not to do anything would have been a failure of our duty to the United Nations." A number of detainees have been referred to military commissions. International law requires that states trying prisoners in military commissions apply the same rules that they would use for their own citizens. This is apparently not the case with the US military commissions set up in haste in the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks. "These military commissions significantly depart from US military justice system and the way military commissions have been used historically -- they don't follow the rules of military commissions," Bierman said. "If there is no yardstick for fairness, it is so easy for the government to make up the rules as it goes along." Under the new rules, for instance, an accused may not be able to see all the evidence against him. Also, information obtained under what US authorities may call "harsh interrogation", but widely accepted as plain torture, would be allowed in court as evidence. The US government justifies the indeterminate detention, without charge or trial, of the men held at Guantanamo Bay by classifying them as "unlawful enemy combatants", and refuses to grant them prisoners of war status. The current administration has characterised them as the "worst of the worst" -- dangerous terrorists who took up arms against America. "But the government's own documents reveal this is not the case: the vast majority of the men held in Guantanamo Bay were not captured in a battle zone or even in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan," Bierman said. According to Pentagon documents cited by lawyers representing some of the detainees, only eight per cent of the men imprisoned at the base are classified "Al-Qaeda fighters". Under the rules of war a party to a conflict may hold enemy combatants as prisoners until the end of hostilities. The purpose for the detention in this case is to prevent the prisoners from taking up arms again. The purpose of holding terrorism suspects in Guantanamo Bay is, by the US authorities' own admission, interrogation to extract from them information on the Al-Qaeda network that might be vital for fighting terrorism. The UN report concludes that the global struggle against international terrorism does not constitute an armed conflict and detention for the purposes of interrogation is not sufficient ground for indefinite deprivation of personal liberty. A US federal judge also ruled last year that the Bush administration must allow the detainees in Guantanamo Bay to contest their detention in US courts and that the special military reviews established by the Pentagon as an alternative were illegal. "Although this nation unquestionably must take strong action under the leadership of the commander-in-chief to protect itself against enormous and unprecedented threats, that necessity cannot negate the existence of the most basic fundamental rights for which the people of this country have fought and died for well over 200 years," judge Joyce Hens Green said in the ruling. And in a landmark decision in 2004, the US Supreme Court ruled that the detainees had the right to contest the accusations against them and challenge their indefinite detention. There have been alarming reports about the effects of the prolonged detention, under harsh conditions, on the health of the detainees. Many have gone on a hunger strike months ago and some are reportedly being kept alive through force- feeding. "The totality of the conditions of their confinement at Guantanamo Bay constitutes a right-to-health violation because they derive from a breach of duty and have resulted in profound deterioration of the mental health of many detainees," the report states. The report also says that interrogation techniques authorised by the US Defense Department for use in Guantanamo Bay constitute a breach of the Convention against Torture. There is a growing chorus of calls for the closure of Guantanamo Bay. Reacting to the UN report, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that the military prison was an "anomaly" which must be dealt with "sooner or later", but stopped short of saying it should be closed now. Some British MPs have said it should and have reproached the government for not going far enough in its condemnation. After a long government lobbying, nine UK nationals who were formerly held at Guantanamo Bay have been repatriated to Britain and released without charge. Also reacting to the report in a British radio interview, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa -- who was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace in 1984 for his longtime opposition to apartheid rule ---- said: "I never imagined I would live to see the day when the United States would use precisely the same arguments that the apartheid government used for detention without trial. It is disgraceful. One cannot find strong enough words to condemn what Britain and the United States and some of their allies have accepted."
