Guantánamo Bay
Ahead of the resumption of pre-trial hearings in the case of Yemeni prisoner Abd Al-Nashiri, in early June, the UN working group on arbitrary detention condemned the US and seven other countries “- Afghanistan, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Thailand, United Arab Emirates - which allegedly transferred or detained him between 2002-2006” for the torture and human rights violations he has suffered in detention: “The United Nations working group on arbitrary detention said he had been arbitrarily detained for more than 20 years and it voiced concern about his physical and mental well-being.”
https://www.reuters.com/world/un-body-condemns-us-others-treatment-guantanamo-inmate-2023-06-05/
During the pre-trial hearing, in a case which could see this CIA torture victim face the death penalty, the judge heard the last few witnesses on the issue of the admissibility of evidence from torture-tainted interrogations and the impact of years of torture on the statements he made admitting to terrorist acts. “The judge’s ruling is on track to be the first major decision at the war court about the admissibility of interrogations by federal agents who were brought to Guantánamo Bay to build a fresh case against former C.I.A. prisoners.” According to the final defence witness, former CIA officer Retired Colonel Steven M. Kleinman, “prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation and brutality like that experienced by the C.I.A. prisoners degrades memory and leads to false confessions. Such treatment impairs a prisoner’s “ability to answer reliably” even years later, he said, adding that a prisoner “may be willing but is no longer able to correctly recall events.””
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/17/us/politics/guantanamo-torture-cia-cole-prisoner.html
“The motion to suppress al Nashiri’s Guantanamo statements are among several critical motions pending before [Judge] Acosta, who intends to issues a series of rulings prior to his retirement later this summer. Al Nashiri’s team has asked Acosta to suppress the hearsay statements of Salim Hamdan elicited by federal agents in 2002, when Hamdan was a detainee at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. (Hamdan was freed shortly after his transfer to Yemen in 2008. An appeals court later overturned his military commission conviction.) The team has also moved to suppress the statements that a current Guantanamo Bay detainee, Walid bin Attash, made to FBI and NCIS agents in his interrogations in early 2007. Bin Attash, who is charged in the separate military commission over the Sept. 11 attacks, is suspected of playing a role in the USS Cole bombing. Both Hamdan and bin Attash have given information that implicates al Nashiri. Defense lawyers are also challenging more than 100 hearsay statements made by Yemeni witnesses and possible suspects to federal agents in the months and years after the attack on the USS Cole.”
On 26 June, International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, presented her report on her visit to Guantánamo Bay and other sites involved in the war on terror and meetings with victims and their families. She is the first UN Special Rapporteur to be given access to Guantánamo Bay since it opened over 21 years ago. In the report, she states that “The U.S. Government is under a continued obligation to ensure accountability, make full reparation for the injuries caused, and offer appropriate guarantees of non-repetition for violations committed post-9/11”. With respect to Guantánamo, she “concludes that the foregoing conditions constitute a violation of the right to available, adequate, and acceptable health care—as part of the State’s obligation to guarantee the rights to life, freedom from torture and ill- treatment, humane treatment of prisoners, and effective remedy—have resulted in the significant deterioration of the physical and mental health of detainees, compounding post-traumatic symptoms and other severe and persistent health consequences co-related to temporal continuities of healthcare provision at Guantánamo Bay. She finds that the cumulative effects of these structural deficiencies amount to, at minimum, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment under international law. Moreover, the U.S. Government’s failure to provide torture rehabilitation squarely contravenes its obligations under the Convention against Torture.” She also calls for prisoners to have better access to their families, equal access to lawyers and fair trial rights and urged the US government to apologise to the prisoners. The US government has issued a one-page response which is covered here: https://www.justsecurity.org/87093/takeaways-from-the-un-special-rapporteur-report-on-guantanamo/
The report: https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-terrorism/us-and-guantanamo-detention-facility
