UN experts decry treatment of Guantanamo detainees

With nearly consistent surveillance, gruelling isolation and constrained family get entry to, the treatment of the final 30 Guantanamo detainees is “merciless, inhuman and degrading,” UN rights specialists said Monday as they said on their first visit to the US navy prison.

UN Special Rapporteur Fionnuala Ni Aolain said mistreatment at the prison on an American naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, amounted to violations of detainees’ fundamental rights and freedoms.

The detainees, held near many years after being seized as suspects following the 2001 Al-Qaeda attack at the United States, have persisted a litany of abuse, along with compelled cell extractions, bad scientific and intellectual health care, stated Ni Aolain.

The detainees additionally have had insufficient access to circle of relatives either with the aid of in-person visits or calls, she stated in a press briefing.

“The totality of all of those practices and omissions … Amounts in my evaluation to ongoing cruel, inhuman and degrading remedy under international law,” she said.Ni Aolain, the UN Special Rapporteur at the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, travelled to Guantanamo with a group in February after UN rights professionals had sought to go to the jail for 2 a long time.

Introducing the crew’s report, she said Washington had yet to address the maximum evident rights violation associated with the detainees: their secret seizure and transfer – or rendition – to Guantanamo within the early 2000s, and, for lots, enduring great torture by way of US operatives inside the first years after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Their deliberate navy trials were stalled for years over the question of whether they are able to receive truthful justice if they had been tortured.

That is unfair to the sufferers of the Sept. 11 assault as properly, said Ni Aolain.

“The systematic rendition and torture at a couple of (along with black) websites and thereafter at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba … Comprise the unmarried most tremendous barrier to satisfying sufferers’ rights to justice and responsibility,” the UN Special Rapporteur stated.Nevertheless, she welcomed the management of President Joe Biden’s openness for allowing her crew to visit Guantanamo and take a look at the treatment of the detainees, who as soon as numbered almost 800.

“Few states showcase that type of courage,” she said.

Nevertheless, she said, closure of the jail, which remains out of doors america justice machine, “remains a concern.”

In addition, “the US authorities must ensure accountability for all violations of worldwide regulation, both for victims of its counterterrorism practices, gift and previous detainees, and sufferers of terrorism,” she said.

Accountability, she stated, includes apologies, complete treatment and reparations for “all sufferers,” she stated.

In a letter to Ni Aolain at the document, Michele Taylor, the USA envoy to UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, stated the USA does not receive all of her checks.

“We are devoted to imparting secure and humane treatment for detainees,” Taylor wrote.