Prisoners on the US authorities’s Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba are being subjected to “merciless, inhuman and degrading remedy,” based on evaluation by an impartial UN arbiter.
In February, UN monitor Fionnuala Ni Aolain turned the primary human rights investigator to be granted entry to the power in its two-decade historical past. Regardless of praising the administration of US President Joe Biden for allowing her to audit the camp, Ni Aolain has detailed a variety of “human rights points” in a 23-page report, together with the “unwillingness of the authorities to face the implications of the torture” being carried out at Guantanamo.
Talking at a press convention on Monday following the discharge of the report, Ni Aolain mentioned that “after 20 years of custody, the struggling of these detained is profound, and it’s ongoing.” She added that “each single detainee” is affected by the “unrelenting harms that comply with from systematic practices of rendition, torture and arbitrary detention.”
In its 21-year historical past, some 780 males have been detained on the camp, which was created quickly after the September 11, 2001 assaults as a part of the US authorities’s so-called ‘Warfare or Terror’. Present US President Biden beforehand said his intention to close down the power, as did former chief Barack Obama.
Nonetheless, in late 2021 the Biden administration rubber-stamped plans to increase the power with the introduction of a brand new $4 million courtroom. The location has been predominantly used to detain Muslim militants and suspected terrorists apprehended by the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
Ni Aolain accused the US authorities of failing to offer rehabilitation packages for detainees dealing with “pressing psychological and bodily well being points,” starting from comparatively minor medical complaints to everlasting disabilities and traumatic mind accidents. She additionally expressed “profound concern” that 19 of the 30 males on the facility had by no means been charged with against the law – with some having been in US custody for 20 years.
Amongst her suggestions following the evaluate, Ni Aolain mentioned that the power ought to be instantly closed.
In response to the report, Washington mentioned that each one UN member states ought to be open to “the scrutiny of out of doors observers” however defended the circumstances at Guantanamo Bay as “humane.”
“Detainees stay communally and put together meals collectively; obtain specialised medical and psychiatric care; are given full entry to authorized counsel; and talk commonly,” learn an announcement issued from the desk of the US ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council, Michele Taylor.
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