British MPs confirm Guantanamo Bay abuse
Members of British parliament’s committee on Foreign Affairs say that thousands of detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been abused.
The parliamentarians who returned from a visit to the US concentration camp at its naval base in Guantanamo, where the detainees were being held without charges, disclosed this in a report released at the weekend.
The all-party group of APs, warned that the U. S. risked undermining the Geneva Conventions and called for the treaty to be revised in order to provide protection to what the US termed “unlawful enemy combatants .”
“We conclude that abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay has almost certainly taken place in the past,” the report said.
They recommended that the UK government would continue to raise with the U. S. authorities human rights concerns about the treatment of detainees.
The British committee became the first members of a national parliament, apart from the US Congress, to visit the concentration camp, set up by the US five years ago, last September.
They discovered that the facilities at Guantanamo were comparable with those at UK’s equivalent maximum security detention center at Belmarsh but said that other conditions at the camp were inadequate.
Their report added that the UK Government should “recognise that the Geneva Conventions are failing to provide necessary protection because they lack clarity and are out of date.”
“The revision proposed in a way deals more satisfactorily with asymmetric warfare, international terrorism, the status of irregular combatants, and with the treatment of detainees,” they stated
In essence, the committee recommended that in line with its previous reports, “those detained at Guantanamo must be dealt with transparently and in full conformity with all applicable national and international law.”
The MPs, however, rejected calls for some eight British residents to be repatriated to the UK, saying the government was “right to stick to its established policy of not accepting consular responsibility for non-British nationals.”
They further recommended that the UK engaged actively with the U. S. and the international community to assist in the process of closing Guantanamo.
“This should only be consistent with the overriding need to protect the public from terrorist threats,”they advised.
“Many of those detained present a real threat to public safety and all states are under an obligation to protect their citizens and those of other countries from that threat,” they said.
The report also warned that “at present, that obligation is being discharged by the US alone, in ways that have attracted strong criticism”.
The report concluded that the international community as a whole needed to shoulder its responsibility by finding a longer-term solution.