Guantanamo Bay Breaches

Have the rights of individuals been breached in Guantanamo Bay? And if they are, how are their rights being breached?

Para on basic info of camps

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that United States detention centres such as Guantanamo Bay are breaching the rights of individuals who are detained there. Reports from the Red Cross, other organisations and released prisoners show that detainees are often subject to violent interrogation and torture, whereas the United States administration argues that the activities they are conducting are legal and do not breach any human rights. (Ratner, M. and Ray, E. 2004). Presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama have often defended accusations and reports claiming that inhuman techniques have

This allows the administration to do almost anything to these detainees. Although they should be restricted by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, government officials have not acted in accordance with these guidelines on a number of occasions, meaning that detainees often do not have the protection of any human rights

Obama proposed that persons detained in Guantanamo Bay must be in “civilised and acceptable conditions”, and have their cases reviewed regularly by independent judges to “ensure that the threat that they represent is still present.” This tried to reverse the announcement by the Bush administration that detainees will be tried by military commissions, not civilian courts. (Firth, L. 2011). Although some Guantanamo cases have been tried in US civilian courts, there has still been evidence of human rights violations. For example, Binyam Mohamed was tried in 2009 by a District Court judge, who described Mohamed’s time in Guantanamo as a “lengthy and brutal experience”. There was evidence that Mohamed had been physically and psychologically tortured. He was not allowed sleep or food, guards had mutilated his genitals, he was held in stress positions for days on end. Added to this, he was locked in a dark room, forced to listen to loud music and the screaming of other prisoners around him. This case clearly shows that although the prisoner was allowed a fair trial by an independent US court, he was abused and tortured. There is no argument whether this breached his human rights; even the government did not dispute the