Guantanamo Bay Detainee Human Rights Are Violated

Human Rights Violations at Guantanamo Bay

Hundreds

of foreign nationals are being held in prison camps at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base since January 2002 without access to any court, legal counsel or family visits. Despite repeated appeals by international organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as well as several governments around the world, the U.S. administration refuses to grant the detainees prisoners of war (POW) status or bring charges against them under the due process of law. In this essay, I shall explain why the continued detention of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners without trial is a violation of international and U.S. law and how their human rights are being violated.

Status of Prisoners Not Revealed

Most of the prisoners being held in Guantanamo Bay were captured during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Other inmates of Guantanamo are those who were captured elsewhere by various governments and handed over to the U.S. authorities. The U.S. government classifies the prisoners as illegal enemy combatants, while refusing to bring them before a "competent tribunal" to determine their status, as required by Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention. ("Guantanamo Bay" 2005) The U.S. authorities have also denied the rights of the due process of law to the prisoners guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by taking the position that Guantanamo Bay technically lies outside the U.S. territory and the laws of the United States do not apply to foreigners held outside its territory.

Illegal Position of U.S. Authorities

Both these positions of the U.S. government, i.e., refusing to grant the prisoners rights under the Geneva Convention or the U.S. law, have been challenged as illegal by the detainees at Guantanamo Bay as well as the Amnesty International. Even the U.S. Supreme Court in its majority (6-3) decision of June 28, 2004 in Rasul v. Bush ruled that foreign nationals imprisoned without charge at the Guantanamo Bay interrogation camps were entitled to bring legal action challenging their captivity in U.S. federal civilian courts. (Welsh, 2004)

In November 2001, President Bush signed a Military Order for the setting up of military commissions to try the detainees at Guantanamo Bay; the commissions were given the powers to hand down death sentences against whose decision there was no right of appeal to any court. The first trials under the Commission were scheduled for December 2004 and would have been a mockery of the U.S. Justice System as the commissions lacked independence; the defendants had no right to choose their own counsel for an effective defense; and lower standards of evidence were acceptable to the commissions including evidence extracted under torture or coercion. This order too was ruled as illegal on November 9, 2004 when a U.S. District Court Judge held that the Bush Administration had overstepped its authority to try such prisoners as enemy combatants in a military tribunal while denying them access to the evidence used against them. The U.S. government has appealed against the ruling.

Human Rights Abuses at Guantanamo Bay

The list of human rights abuses by the U.S. authorities at the Guantanamo Bay prison camps is long and scandalous. It started with their transportation to the makeshift "X-Ray Camp" in January 2002, when prisoners from Afghanistan were shifted in airplanes while being chained and shackled and forced to wear painted goggles and earmuffs so they could not see or hear anything. The prisoners were chained to the floor of the aircraft for the entire duration of the 22-hour flight, with no access to a toilet. According to the testimony of former prisoner Shafiq Rasul to Amnesty International, "during the plane journey the shackles had been on so tight that they really cut into me. I still have scarring on my left arm from them and I lost the feeling in my right hand for a long time because they were on so tight." ("Guantanamo: Detainees Account," 2004, pp 4-5) The mistreatment and torture of the prisoners has continued unabated since their transfer. The detainees have been forced into inhuman living conditions such as the tiny wire-mesh cages at Camp X-Ray and the maximum security blocks in Camp Delta which are even smaller, and have been subjected to third degree interrogation methods such as sleep deprivation, repeated interrogations, and mock beatings.

Recent revelations about the human rights abuse at Guantanamo Bay are even more shocking. A former U.S. soldier who had been a translator during interrogation sessions at the Camps, has revealed that prisoners were physically assaulted by "snatch squads" and subjected to sexual interrogation techniques