US, WASHINGTON (ORDO NEWS) — The prison at the American military base Guantanamo is a shame for the United States and should have been closed long ago. This opinion was expressed in a statement released on Monday in Geneva, timed to coincide with the 19th anniversary of the establishment of this penitentiary, by eight independent UN experts.
“The very existence of this facility is a shame for the United States and the international community as a whole. Guantanamo should have been closed long ago,” the document says. According to experts, this is a prison in which abuses are committed, and the torture and ill-treatment of prisoners has become flagrant. In it, “the rule of law is suspended and justice is rejected.”
Experts recall that in 2003, 700 people were held in the dungeons of Guantanamo, and after 19 years there are still 40 prisoners. Only nine of them were charged or sentenced for crimes. The authors of the statement called on the new US administration, which in January will replace the current one following the results of the presidential elections held in the country in 2020, “to close Guantanamo once and for all.”
The statement was signed by UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Niels Meltzer, his colleagues on human rights in the context of the fight against terrorism Fionnual Ni Aolain and on extrajudicial executions Agnes Callamar, as well as five experts from the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
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