Secret Detentions—UN Report

The United Nations has called on the United States “to shut secret detention facilities and faulted the Bush administration for human rights abuses including failing to allow the Red Cross access to prisoners held in the war on terrorism.”^[1] The 12-page report was unsurprisingly dismissed by the State Department, which said “it was ‘disappointed’ with the findings of the report and the committee ‘loses perspective and credibility’ by spending more time criticizing the U.S. than ‘countries with no civil and political rights’ such as North Korea.”^[2]

The UN Human Rights Committee has declared that it has “credible and uncontested” reports of secret prisons, in which people have been held for months and years.^[3] It also was concerned “that for a period of time, the [US] had authorized interrogation techniques such as prolonged stress positions and isolation, sensory deprivation, hooding, exposure to cold or heat, and 20-hour interrogations.”^[4] Those policies have been removed from the present Army Field Manual, and the Committee welcomed that development, just as it welcomed the Supreme Court’s ruling in Hamdan.^[5]

The Committee also noted that “poor people, and in particular African-Americans, had been disadvantaged by the Hurricane Katrina rescue and evacuation plans,” and called on the US to “assess the extent to which the death penalty was disproportionately imposed on ethnic minorities and on the low-income population.”^[6]

It is certainly accurate to note that the US in some ways has received attention from a harsher light than some of the world’s less-than-stellar countries. Ivan Shearer, a member of the committee, admitted that they “expect something better from the US than [they] expect from a developing country that has suffered internal turmoil.”^[7]

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[1] U.S. Should Close Secret Detention Centers, UN Says, Bloomberg, Jul. 28, 2006.
[2] Id.
[3] Richard Waddington, UN Rights Body Tells US to Shut “Secret” Jails, Reuters, Jul. 28, 2006.
[4] UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Human Rights Committee Concludes Eighty-Seventh Session, Jul. 28, 2006.
[5] Id.
[6] Id.
[7] Bloomberg, supra note 1.