Human Rights Watch reports on a concerning court ruling from the USA which has echoes of the major human rights breaches enabled under Australian laws permitting the indefinite mandatory detention of innocent people who have no other country to go to and the forcible transportation of refugees to Nauru where they were beyond the reach of any legal processes.
A federal appeals court has found that US courts lack the authority to order the release of 17 people, all of whom are Chinese Uighurs, who have been locked up in Guantanamo Bay since 2001, even while acknowledging they are wrongfully detained. They can’t (or shouldn’t) be returned to China, due to “credible fears that they would be tortured upon return,” but no other country will take them. Presumably these countries hold the not unreasonable view that the USA should take the people themselves, seeing it has been acknowledged the people have no connection with terrorism, and “the Uighur community in the US has promised to provide housing, language and job training, and any other support they may need.”
So even when a Court finds people are wrongfully detained, they can still be locked up indefinitely, as long as they are kept at a location outside the jurisdiction of US Courts. No doubt this ruling will be appealed, but such blatant injustices are hardly going to help make the world a safer place.
This comes on top of the recent revelations by an Army Private, Brandon Neely, who served as a prison guard at Guantanamo (h/t Club Troppo). According to this account by Scott Horton in Harper’s Magazine, “the Nelly account shows that health professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners.”
Neely describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgement that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes.
Our major ally, in our name, has done and is doing this. Our government knew, or should have known, and did nothing to try to bring an end to it.
