Human Rights Watch: Review Panels No Fix for Guantanamo

[Jack Rabbit]

Press release from Human Rights Watch
Dateline Washington, Tuesday July 27

US: Review Panels No Fix for Guantanamo

The Pentagon’s new tribunals to review combatant status will not give detainees at Guantanamo a fair opportunity to challenge their detention, Human Rights Watch said today. The tribunals are expected to begin this week.
The tribunals are seriously flawed, Human Rights Watch said. They are not set up to be impartial, they will place severe limits on detainees’ ability to make their claims, and they are predicated on the Pentagon’s erroneous belief that all enemy combatants at Guantanamo can still be held under the laws of war.
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that U.S. courts may hear claims from detainees at Guantanamo. Since then, more than 30 detainees have filed petitions for habeas corpus, asking the courts to decide whether their detention is lawful. Human Rights Watch is concerned that the U.S. Department of Defense is attempting to restrict the scope of court review by creating tribunals that will largely confirm the status quo, and that the Pentagon will then ask courts to defer to these tribunals when they hear a detainee’s case . . . .
Human Rights Watch questions whether the status review tribunals can be genuinely neutral and impartial. The military order creating these tribunals explicitly designates the detainees as enemy combatants, consistent with the position that senior U.S. military and administration officials have maintained for over two and a half years. To find that a detainee is not an enemy combatant, military officers on the panel will have to accept the claims put forward by a detainee over the stated position of their superiors.
?These tribunals presume that all of the detainees are enemy combatants," said (Wendy) Patten (U.S. advocacy director at Human Rights Watch). "But that’s the very issue the tribunals are supposed to be deciding."

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