Robinson backs UN calls to shut down Camp Delta

Former Irish president and UN commissioner for human rights Mary Robinson has joined calls for the United States to shut its Camp Delta prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba over alleged abuses.

The United Nations report - backed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan - called for the immediate closure of the controversial site in Cuba. The camp was opened in 2002 to hold terror suspects seized during the Afghanistan war and is believed to contain around 500 inmates.

Yesterday's UN report, ordered by the body's Commission on Human Rights, called on the US government to refrain from any practice "amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" at Guantanamo.

It said all detainees should be brought to trial or released "without further delay" and the facility closed. Some aspects of prisoners' treatment, including force-feeding hunger strikers, amounted to torture, it said.

"I think sooner or later, there will be a need to close Guantanamo," Mr Annan said.

"I think it will be up to the (US) government to decide, hopefully, to do it as soon as is possible."

Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, called on the US to respect the findings of the UN observers, who carried out their investigation "under the international covenant on civil and political rights, which the US ratified and hasn't in any way derogated from and therefore is bound by, legally".

She called on the EU and Canada and other states to "take up seriously" the issue of Guantanamo with the US.

"There is cogent reason why Guantanamo Bay should be closed and those detained there either charged or released," she said. "It's a wake-up call. If this report is simply ignored by the US and the rest of the democratic, responsible, world ... how are we going to get an effective human rights council?

"This is, to me, a litmus test of whether we have an effective, international system of human rights law."

"If the United States will not take it seriously then I think we are in serious trouble," she added. "I hope at least behind closed doors America's friends will say for all our sakes, we are talking about minds and hearts, we are talking about the rule of law, we are talking about democratic principles and upholding human rights, how can we have an effective human rights council if you don't take seriously this report."

Following the report's publication, the US administration dismissed its findings as "largely without merit".

A detainee sits with a towel on his head near his cell in Camp Four at Camp Delta. (Photo: Reuters)

The five UN investigators who compiled the report had refused an invitation to visit Guantanamo Bay, said a spokesman, because the United States would not allow them interview detainees. They relied instead on interviews with former detainees, public documents, media reports, lawyers and a questionnaire filled out by the US Government.

But Mrs Robinson dismissed the US claims that the observers refused to visit the camp. "In the report, that's fully explained that [the UN observers] did their best to co-operate with the authorities and to get a proper visit to Guantanamo Bay. But they couldn't accept the exclusion of private interviews with detainees for the short visit that was being held out," she said.

"They wouldn't do that in China, they wouldn't do it in Russia, and they shouldn't ever do it because it would diminish international standards."

Veteran South African anti-apartheid campaigner Archbishop Desmond Tutu joined the chorus of condemnation of Guantanamo Bay. "I never imagined I would live to see the day when the United States and its satellites would use precisely the same arguments that the apartheid government used for detention without trial. It is disgraceful," he said.

Last night, Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain became the first British government minister explicitly to demand the closure. He also said he believed that Prime Minister Tony Blair shared his view.

Mr Hain told BBC1's

Question Time

: "I would prefer that it wasn't there. I would prefer it was closed, yes." Mr Blair told MPs last November that Guantanamo Bay was "an anomaly that sooner or later has to be dealt with".