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Rights Groups Slam U.S. Detention Of Afghan POWs
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| Rumsfeld says Afghan prisoners have
"no rights" |
WASHINGTON, Jan. 14 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - After a controversial statement by U.S. Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, last week that captured Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters "have no rights" under the Geneva Convention, experts and human rights groups said Monday that the U.S. detention of prisoners has plunged international law into a complex and potentially dangerous limbo.
They said they were seriously concerned over the conditions in which they are being held and the legal minefield ahead, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
If the situation was not clarified quickly, they warned, the United States risked losing the moral high ground it has claimed since the September 11 terrorist attacks.
"One of the elements which is disturbing is the lack of transparency about their treatment," said Adam Roberts, a professor of international relations at Oxford University in the U.K.
Roberts, the co-editor of a book on the laws of war, said it was important U.S. officials observed the underlying principle of the 1949 Geneva Convention, which is that anyone captured in war should be treated humanely.
"There's some justice in the U.S. side," he said, "but what's very disturbing is the lack of a clear acceptance that they are still subject to human rights principles."
Washington is qualifying the prisoners as "unlawful combatants," according to Rumsfeld, who said that this categorization allowed the U.S. to deny them rights.
"They will be handled not as prisoners of war - because they're not - but as unlawful combatants," Rumsfeld said Friday. "As I understand it, technically, unlawful combatants do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention."
He said, however, that the prisoners would be treated "for the most part" in a manner "reasonably consistent" with the convention.
The human rights group, Amnesty International, for one, is concerned as to what exactly "reasonably consistent" means.
In a letter to U.S. authorities, it said the hooding of suspects in detention could breach international law, as could their imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay in chain-link cages partially open to the elements.
Rights advocates from Human Rights Watch (HRW) questioned Rumsfeld's strict definition of the detainees' status, observing that international law called for all detainees, including unlawful combatants, to be treated humanely.
"The Secretary seems unaware of the requirements of international humanitarian law," said Jamie Fellner, director of HRW's U.S. Program, in a news release issued Friday.
"As a party to the Geneva Conventions, the United States is required to treat every detained combatant humanely, including unlawful combatants. The United States may not pick and choose among them to decide who is entitled to decent treatment."
Fellner also called the proposed use of cages with chain-link sides and concrete floors "a scandal."
"The United States should not be transporting detainees to Cuba until it can provide decent shelter," he said.
A first batch of 20 fighters has already been flown to Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base in Cuba, and another 30 were en route Monday.
Shackled and hooded on the flight, they will be held in spartan conditions and because the base is technically on foreign territory, they will have no protections granted in the U.S. constitution for those brought to trial within the U.S.’s borders.
The Pentagon has said the prisoners will have medical care and the right to practice their religion, but not the right to an attorney.
Michael Byers, a teacher of international law at Duke University, in North Carolina, said it was not up to Rumsfeld to decide who was a criminal and who was a prisoner of war.
"Even if the detainees were not POWs," he wrote in an article for Britain's Guardian newspaper Monday, "they remain human beings with human rights."
He said the United States was in danger of losing the moral high ground "in return for nothing but the fleeting satisfaction of early revenge."
Byers was also concerned that the Pentagon was making up its own rules for the legal route ahead, effectively playing judge, jury and executioner.
Oxford University's Roberts agreed. "There's something of a legal limbo in the whole arrangement," he said.
He pointed out that while POWs are meant to be repatriated once hostilities cease, in this case, they are highly dangerous suspects trained to commit acts of terrorism at any time.
Still, that is no reason to bend the rule of law, said Sarah de Mas, deputy director of the British pressure group Fair Trials Abroad.
She said the situation was "muddled" because although U.S. President, George W. Bush, spoke repeatedly of a "war" against terrorism, the United States never actually declared war.
"It does appear that this country, which is the most powerful in the world, is using powers indiscriminately," she told AFP.
"The long-term effects could be extremely dangerous for all of us."
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