The Information
A United Nations human rights panel has issued a damning report that blames the USA and 7 different nations for the C.I.A.’s “torture and merciless, inhuman or degrading therapy” of a Saudi prisoner who now awaits a dying penalty trial at Guantánamo Bay.
The U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention additionally named as accountable the United Arab Emirates, the place the prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was captured in 2002, and Afghanistan, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania and Thailand, the place he was held as a part of a rendition and interrogation program run by the George W. Bush administration.
The working group, which has no enforcement authority, adopted the 18-page report on Nov. 15 however didn’t launch it till this weekend.
The group referred to as for the speedy launch of and compensation for Mr. Nashiri, who’s accused of orchestrating the bombing of the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole off Yemen practically 23 years in the past. It stated the Guantánamo warfare crimes court docket, which was devised to prosecute solely non-U.S. residents, deprives Mr. Nashiri of “the honest trial ensures that may ordinarily apply throughout the judicial system of the USA.”
Why It Issues: Criticism of Guantánamo Bay is mounting, once more.
The discovering is the newest in a collection of U.N. investigations condemning the earlier and present therapy of detainees being held at Guantánamo Bay at a time when attorneys and the Worldwide Committee of the Purple Cross have protested insufficient well being look after the final detainees there.
The U.N. our bodies are additionally refocusing consideration on the Pentagon jail, which holds 30 prisoners of the warfare on terrorism, together with 17 males for whom the Biden administration is searching for international locations to supply them resettlement.
The report may very well be offered to a sentencing jury of U.S. army officers in Mr. Nashiri’s case. In October 2021, a army jury within the case of one other Guantánamo prisoner who was tortured by the C.I.A. urged clemency and referred to as that prisoner’s abuse “a stain on the ethical fiber of America.”
Background: Torture has been on the coronary heart of the Cole case.
U.S. investigations and testimony in Mr. Nashiri’s case present he was waterboarded by psychologists working as contractors for the C.I.A., confined bare to a claustrophobic wood field, and subjected to threats and violence, together with rectal abuse, by company workers members.
His army commissions case has been in pretrial proceedings since 2011. Seventeen U.S. sailors had been killed within the suicide bombing of the Cole in Aden Harbor, and prosecutors argue the case could be tried within the court docket that was created in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults.
Mr. Nashiri’s attorneys describe him as a torture survivor who suffers from post-traumatic stress dysfunction, despair and different circumstances attributed to untreated bodily, psychological and sexual abuse.
What’s Subsequent: Extra pretrial hearings, and international locations are requested to reply.
Mr. Nashiri has extra hearings this month targeted on what proof can be utilized at his eventual capital trial. The decide within the case is retiring, and a brand new one is predicted to take over this summer time.
One in all Mr. Nashiri’s attorneys, Katie Carmon, stated on Sunday that if Mr. Nashiri had been convicted, the newest U.N. report may very well be a foundation for a authorized submitting searching for sentencing credit score as a result of he was subjected to “pretrial punishment” as a prisoner of the USA.
The U.N. panel requested the international locations to report on any human rights reforms they’d adopted and whether or not they had adopted any of its suggestions.
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