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Suicides Show Need to Shut Guantanamo: UN Experts
Agence France Presse
June 14, 2006
GENEVA , June 14, 2006 (AFP) - Five UN human rights experts on Wednesday joined mounting protests against the US prison camp at GuantanamoBay in the wake of the suicide of three inmates, saying the controversial facility should be shut down.
"The simultaneous suicide of three detainees in the Guantanamo military base on June 10 was to a certain extent foreseeable in light of the harsh and prolonged conditions of their detention, and reinforces the need for the urgent closure of the detention center," they said.
The five independent experts, who act as monitors for the UN's human rights body, have repeatedly taken Washington to task over Guantanamo.
In February they released a highly critical report accusing the United States of violating a host of international human rights rules and called for the immediate closure of the facility and the trial or release of the hundreds of inmates held in legal limbo.
Only 10 of the 460 people held there as "enemy combatants" have been formally charged since the camp opened in early 2002 at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Washington says many of the other inmates are highly dangerous suspected Al-Qaeda members or Taliban fighters. It does not acknowledge that they are prisoners of war or entitled to the full protection of the Geneva Conventions.
The five experts -- Leandro Despouy, special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, arbitrary detention expert Leila Zerrougui, and Paul Hunt, Manfred Nowak and Asma Jahangir, who work respectively for the UN's health, torture and religious freedom watchdogs -- also renewed their long-standing demand for an unfettered visit to Guantanamo.
Criticism of the prison has climbed since guards on Saturday discovered that three inmates -- two Saudis and a Yemeni -- had hanged themselves with clothes and sheets in their maximum security cells.
The UN experts said that the suicides reaffirmed a warning, contained in their February report, that "the treatment of detainees since their arrests, and the conditions of their confinement, have had profound effects on the mental health of many of them."
The deaths, amid a prisoner hunger strike, were described by US officials as the first successful suicides after repeated attempts at the camp.
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