GUANTANAMO BAY AN INSULT TO DEMOCRACY
December 14, 2007 12:02 PM
Constituents rightly continue to raise Guantanamo Bay detention camp, this is an insult to democracy and a violation of the principles the War on Terror purports to defend. It is a military prison and interrogation camp in which the US Government is holding suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban terror operatives without charge. It continues to attract controversy domestically and internationally. Since 2001 of the detainees taken there, around 420 have been released; many of the 355 that remain have been cleared for release but the US government is having difficulty finding places to send them.
The Bush administration labelled those held as 'enemy combatants'. After 2004, America started using Combat Status Review Tribunals (CSRT) to determine whether detainees were in fact 'enemy combatants' - they did not have the power to determine whether a detainee was a PoW. The Geneva Convention requires belligerents to set up competent tribunals in a timely fashion. Yet by this point many of the detainees had been held for two and a half years already. It has also been argued that the CSRT do not qualify under the Geneva Convention on the grounds that they are not competent. Determining whether a detainee is a PoW or not is the purpose of a status review, yet the CSRT is explicitly prohibited from deciding this. The CSRT determined that only 38 prisoners were not 'enemy combatants.'
I continue to be very active in my opposition to this state of affairs and have lobbied the Government to take action, lending support to Early Day Motions and Amnesty International. Abandoning British residents to indefinite imprisonment in obscene conditions was a gross dereliction of duty by our Government. Nine British citizens and seven British residents were held, all of the former have now been released, but the five British residents remain. In August, in what was seen as a departure from the Blair era, Foreign Secretary David Miliband made a formal request to the US Government for their return. In the meantime I and my colleagues continue to support Amnesty International's campaign demanding justice for those still held.
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