Question of Detainees in the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo

views updated

Question of Detainees in the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo

Resolution

By: Government of Cuba

Date: April 14, 2005

Source: "Question of Detainees in the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo." United Nations Economic and Social Council, April 14, 2005.

About the Author: Cuba is a Caribbean nation of approximately eleven million persons. Cuba is a close neighbor to the United States, and the two countries have a long and complicated history. The United States helped Cuba win independence from Spain in the nineteenth century, but kept part of the island known as Guantanamo Bay for itself. The United States often interfered in Cuban politics and society in the years thereafter. Relations between Cuba and the United States have been mutually antagonistic since Fidel Castro came to power and established Communist rule in Cuba during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

INTRODUCTION

This is a draft resolution tabled by Cuba on April 14, 2005 at the sixty-first session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (CHR) meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. It refers to several positions officially taken by the United Nations and the European Parliament expressing disapproval or concern about the United States Government's policy of holding prisoners at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and requests the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights make a report on the situation of the detainees at Guantanamo that is based on visits to the facility. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights is a division of the U.N. Secretariat (the executive arm of the U.N.) and was established by General Assembly resolution in 1993; it is, in the words of its mission statement, "mandated to promote and protect the enjoyment and full realization, by all people, of all rights established in the Charter of the United Nations and in international human rights laws and treaties."

Guantanamo Bay Naval Base is an inholding of approximately 45 square miles (116 square kilometers) controlled by the United States and located on the southeastern coast of Cuba. It has been held by the United States since the Spanish-American War of 1898; since 1959, the Cuban Government has not acknowledged the legality of the lease by which the United States holds Guantanamo. Since 2002, camps at Guantanamo have been used as detention facilities for between five hundred and seven hundred prisoners captured by the United States abroad, primarily in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Relations between the United States and Cuba have been strained since 1959. The United States has maintained a trade embargo on Cuba since 1960 and forbids its citizens to travel there without a license from the Treasury Department. The United States also sponsored a failed military invasion of Cuba in 1961. The introduction of a resolution by Cuba demanding closer inspection of Guantanamo, with possibly embarrassing results for the United States, reflects this history of hostilities.

Cuba submitted a similar draft resolution to the CHR in 2004 but did not insist on having it put to a vote. The 2005 resolution was voted down on April 21, 2005 (8-22 with 23 abstentions). Cuba denounced the vote as "scandalous." All members of the European Union on the Committee voted against the measure, perhaps in order to avoid further antagonizing the United States, which lobbied strongly for its defeat; the European Parliament had already voted, in 2004, to allow a full and independent investigation of allegations of torture and other abuses at Guantanamo.

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights was established by the United Nations in 1946. It was superseded by the Human Rights Council in 2006 after concluding its sixty-second annual session.

PRIMARY SOURCE

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

SIGNIFICANCE

The detention of prisoners at Guantanamo by the United States has been highly controversial, both internationally and within the United States. Only ten of the prisoners held at Guantanamo had, as of early 2006, been charged with a crime. The United States maintains that persons it holds at Guantanamo are not "prisoners of war" but "illegal combatants" or "enemy combatants" and are therefore not covered by the terms of the Third Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war (1929, revised 1949); it has also maintained that since the prisoners are not U.S. citizens and not held on U.S. soil, they have no standing in U.S. courts.

The treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo has been repeatedly criticized since 2002. Human rights groups, former Guantanamo prisoners, and several U.S. military officers who have served at Guantanamo have all claimed that the treatment of prisoners at the facility is torture. An agent of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) told his superiors in 2004 that military interrogators impersonating FBI agents had shackled detainees in fetal position for more than twenty-four hours at a time and allowed them to urinate and defecate on themselves; subjected them to extreme heat, cold and painfully loud levels of noise; deprived them of food and water; and threatened them with growling dogs during interrogations. Allegations of sexual humiliation, beatings, and deliberately violent force-feeding have also been made. The U.S. government maintains that no prisoners have been treated illegally (not only torture but "inhuman and degrading treatment" are banned by treaties signed by the United States) and that its treatment of the detainees, although occasionally using "stress techniques," is justified by the exigencies of what it terms "the war on terror."

The significance of this Cuban draft resolution lay partly in its demand for on-site inspection of Guantanamo. Earlier, the CHR had already commissioned a five-member panel of envoys to examine the human rights situation in Guantanamo, but this panel did not make an on-site inspection of the base. The United States invited the envoys to visit Guantanamo but stated that they would not be allowed to meet with detainees. The envoys declined to visit on the grounds that without access to confidential testimony from prisoners their presence would constitute a "show tour" and thus violate CHR guidelines for prison visits. The envoys based their final report on interviews with former prisoners, detainees' lawyers, and U.S. officials and on other evidence. The report, which was released on February 15, 2006, declared that U.S. treatment of detainees at Guantanamo "must be assessed as amounting to torture" and called for Guantanamo to be closed. In reaction to the report, the European Parliament passed a resolution in February 2006 calling on the United States to close Guantanamo and to treat all prisoners "in accordance with international humanitarian law." The United States stated that the report's conclusions were invalid.

In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court was to decide whether Guantanamo detainees have standing in U.S. courts.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Saar, Erik and Viveca Novak. Inside the Wire: A Military Intelligence Soldier's Eyewitness Account of Life at Guantanamo. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.