The first independent UN investigator to visit the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay said Monday that the 30 inmates there are subjected to “continued cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under international law.”
In a press conference presenting her 23-page report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, the researcher, Irish law professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, said the 2001 bombings in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania in which almost 3,000 people died were “crimes against humanity”. However, she charged that the United States’ use of torture and clandestine confinement abroad of the alleged perpetrators and their accomplices in the years after the attacks violated international human rights law.
Ní Aoláin said his visit marked the first time a US government had allowed a UN investigator to visit the facility, which began operating in 2002.
The researcher praised the government of President Joe Biden for leading by example by allowing access to Guantánamo and “being willing to address the most difficult human rights issues,” and called on other countries that have denied the UN access to centers of detention to do the same as Washington. And she has said she was allowed everything she requested, including meetings with “high value” and “non-high value” detainees at the facility in Cuba.
Regarding the report’s findings, the US government noted in a brief sent to the Human Rights Council that the special investigator’s conclusions “are solely hers” and that “the United States disagrees in material respects with many factual and laws” contained in his report.
Ní Aoláin said that “significant improvements” have been made in the detention of the detainees, but expressed serious concerns about the continued detention of 30 men, whom he said face great insecurity, suffering and anxiety. The researcher herself cited examples of this, which include almost constant surveillance, forced removal of inmates from their cells, and unfair application of restrictions.
“I have observed that, after almost two decades in custody, the suffering of these detainees is profound and continues,” said the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism. . “Each of the detainees I met with lives with the relentless harm that occurs after systematic practices of clandestine confinement in other countries, torture and arbitrary detention.”
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