UN: Agents violated human rights at Guantanamo

A United Nations special investigator has concluded, in a report scheduled for release today, that foreign intelligence agents sent to question US-held terrorism suspects in Guantanamo Bay had violated international human rights laws. According to an advance copy of the report obtained by The Washington Post, Martin Scheinin, a Finnish diplomat and the UN special investigator for human rights, said foreign agents visiting Guantanamo or secret US jails overseas committed "an internationally wrongful act" even if they had merely observed interrogations. "They were acting in breach of their legal obligations in regard to the prohibition on torture and arbitrary detention," Professor Scheinin, a law professor at the European University Institute in Florence, said. The US military has allowed intelligence and law enforcement agents from at least 18 countries to interrogate Guantanamo inmates since the detention centre opened in 2002, according to the Centre for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based group that provides legal representation to many Guantanamo prisoners. According to the group, interrogators from Tunisia, Libya, China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Jordan verbally threatened citizens from their countries held at Guantanamo, warning them they would be abused at home if they did not co-operate. Other countries that have sent interrogators to Guantanamo include Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain and Morocco, the centre says. In his report, Professor Scheinin said intelligence agents were also complicit in human rights violations if they participated in interrogations in other countries where the suspects were abused. For example, he cited evidence that US, British and Australian agents questioned prisoners in Pakistan who were being held "incommunicado" and tortured by the Pakistani intelligence services. Some of the prisoners were later transferred to Guantanamo.