A United Nations skilled has referred to as on the USA to apologise for the torture of Guantanamo Bay jail inmates, to make sure accountability for abuses, and to shut down the notorious US-run detention facility in Cuba.
In a report launched on Monday, UN Particular Rapporteur Fionnuala Ni Aolain thanked the administration of US President Joe Biden for permitting her to entry the ability earlier this yr however careworn the necessity to treatment violations in opposition to detainees.
Ni Aolain stated the torture of detainees at secret areas referred to as black websites and subsequently at Guantanamo is the “single most vital barrier” to making sure justice for the victims of the 9/11 assaults.
“The significance of apology and ensures of non-repetition to each the victims of terrorism and the victims of torture betrayed by these practices shall be no much less urgent within the years forward,” the report learn.
The Guantanamo detention facility opened in 2002 below US President George W Bush to accommodate detainees captured in the course of the so-called “warfare on terror” after al-Qaeda’s 9/11 assaults in New York and Washington, DC on September 11, 2001.
The jail as soon as housed practically 800 detainees. Its inmate inhabitants is now right down to 30, greater than half of whom – 16 detainees – have been declared eligible for launch by US authorities.
Positioned at a US navy base in Cuba, the jail operates below a system of navy commissions that doesn’t assure the identical rights as conventional US courts.
Rights teams have lengthy denounced rights violations at Guantanamo – together with pressured feedings and beatings of detainees, and an absence of due course of – and demanded its closure.
Ni Aolain’s report on Monday stated the abuses are ongoing on the jail facility, highlighting “structural shortcomings and systematic arbitrariness together with in coaching, working procedures, and the success of detainees’ rights to well being care, household council and justice”.
For instance, inmates are referred to as by a serial quantity, not their names – a coverage that Ni Aolain stated “undermines every detainee’s self-worth and dignity, significantly within the lived context of profound deprivation of liberty, communication, and relationship with the surface world”.
Furthermore, Ni Aolain underscored the “near-constant surveillance, pressured cell extractions, undue use of restraints” and solitary confinement that she stated proceed for use at Guantanamo.
Talking to reporters on Monday afternoon, Ni Aolain stated each inmate she met lives with the “unrelenting harms” brought on by their systematic “rendition, torture and arbitrary detention”.
“I noticed that after twenty years of custody, the struggling of these detained is profound, and it’s ongoing,” she stated.
Ni Aolain stated she was the primary UN particular rapporteur to be granted entry to Guantanamo to analyze circumstances on the facility – a reality she credited to the administration of US President Joe Biden.
“It’s this administration who early on in my tenure – by means of a course of of debate and engagement – enabled the go to,” she stated.
Amnesty Worldwide stated Monday’s “scathing” report highlights the necessity to shut down the detention facility.
“It’s properly previous time to demand the closure of the jail, accountability from US officers, and reparations for the torture and different ill-treatment that the detainees have suffered by the hands of the US authorities,” the group’s secretary normal, Agnes Callamard, stated in an announcement.
The Biden administration, which argues it’s working to scale back the variety of inmates on the jail to finally shut it, pushed again in opposition to a few of Ni Aolain’s findings whereas acknowledging her suggestions.
“We’re dedicated to offering protected and humane therapy for detainees at Guantanamo in full accordance with worldwide and US home regulation,” Michele Taylor, US ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council, stated in an announcement launched alongside the report.
“Detainees dwell communally and put together meals collectively; obtain specialised medical and psychiatric care; are given full entry to authorized counsel; and talk recurrently with members of the family.”
Earlier on Monday, Biden launched an announcement to recognise Worldwide Day in Assist of Victims of Torture through which he condemned all “types of inhumane therapy” and pledged that the US would assist torture survivors as they search justice.
“Torture is prohibited in all places and always. It’s unlawful, immoral, and a stain on our collective conscience,” Biden stated.