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Beyond the pale of law and human rights

Every year, the United States State Department publishes a sanctimonious document titled `Country Reports on Human Rights Practices' skewering governments across the world for alleged human rights violations. Countries that do not match up to its standards of democracy are asked to shape up while those that do are given a pat on the back. Washington evidently takes itself very seriously when it comes to human rights — in other countries. In a proclamation on Human Rights Day last year, President George Bush made a "promise of liberty" for countries that denied their citizens human rights and individual freedoms. But for itself, the Bush administration has a whole different set of human rights standards ranging from secret detention centres in different countries to the practice of torture as "a method of interrogation." Described politely as American exceptionalism, this is nothing but double standards. That the U.S. does not practise what it preaches was always known, but never as flagrantly as when pictures of Iraqi prisoners tortured by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib first surfaced in 2004. Now, a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights details the abuse of prisoners at the extra-territorial detention centre at Guantanamo Bay as "amounting to torture." The report wants the U.S to close it down, shift the detainees to U.S. territory, bring them to trial before an international tribunal, or release them.

The Bush administration has cited national security and the threat of terrorism to justify Guantanamo. It has described the report — based on interviews with those fortunate to have been released, and lawyers of those still imprisoned there, aside from U.S. government records, and reports by international human rights organisations — as "inaccurate" and "largely without merit." It has made much of the fact that the U.N. investigators did not visit the camp but the investigators have explained that they rejected a U.S. offer to go to the camp as it made it clear they would not be able to meet prisoners. The truth is as ugly as it is plain: post-9/11, the Bush administration wanted to detain those it suspected of involvement with Al Qaeda outside the jurisdiction of the U.S legal system. Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, under U.S. military occupation since the 1930s, provided the answer, enabling the indefinite detention of suspects without being produced or arraigned in a court. On its fourth anniversary this week, the Guantanamo detention camp continues to hold 490 prisoners beyond the pale of law and human rights. The U.N Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, has thrown his weight behind the report, stating that while he did not agree with everything in it, it is wrong to hold detainees "in perpetuity." The incarcerated are citizens of 40 countries and it is time the world, including India, sends out a strong message to the U.S. that it is not above international law.

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