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US refuses to sign UN ban on renditions and secret detention
Fifty-seven countries signed a UN treaty on Tuesday that bans governments from carrying out forced disappearances and holding individuals in secret detention. Washington, as well as a number of European governments, including Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy, refused to sign.
At the treaty signing in Paris, French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy commented, “Our American friends were naturally invited to this ceremony; unfortunately, they weren’t able to join us.”
US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack commented simply that the treaty “did not meet our expectations.” It is clear from the provisions of the treaty, however, precisely why this is the case.
The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance calls for nations to adopt an “absolute ban” on secret detentions and provides for the tracing of the whereabouts of the “disappeared.” It also obliges each state party to ensure that victims of renditions and secret detention have the right to reparations.
It requires each nation signing on to submit for prosecution by competent authorities any person suspected of carrying out forced disappearances anywhere in the world. The convention also establishes a committee charged with monitoring the implementation of the treaty and to take action in individual cases.
Agents of the Central Intelligence Agency who have been actively involved in renditions around the world—and top US officials who have commissioned them—would be in direct violation of the treaty. Their actions have been authorized and defended by George W. Bush and other members of his administration. Last September, the US president openly acknowledged the existence of a network of secret prisons run by the CIA, and insisted that they continue to operate.
The US practice of sweeping up alleged suspects in the name of the “war on terror” has been condoned as well by US Congress, which adopted in late September the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which rubber-stamped the incarceration of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other US-run detention camps around the world—large numbers of them secret. Prisoners released from Guantanamo and other US-run prison camps have described conditions of torture at the facilities.
French officials who led the effort to institute the ban counted more than 51,000 people who have been disappeared by their governments in over 90 countries since 1980. The vast majority of these individuals—41,000—have never been accounted for and their whereabouts and fate remain a mystery.
Families of the disappeared and human rights organizations have lobbied the UN for years for an international treaty banning such abductions. Washington is determined that the role played by US intelligence agents in such disappearances remains secret and that those responsible be immune from prosecution by either US or international courts.
More
http://wsws.org/articles/2007/feb2007/rend-f09.shtml
US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack commented simply that the treaty “did not meet our expectations.” It is clear from the provisions of the treaty, however, precisely why this is the case.
The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance calls for nations to adopt an “absolute ban” on secret detentions and provides for the tracing of the whereabouts of the “disappeared.” It also obliges each state party to ensure that victims of renditions and secret detention have the right to reparations.
It requires each nation signing on to submit for prosecution by competent authorities any person suspected of carrying out forced disappearances anywhere in the world. The convention also establishes a committee charged with monitoring the implementation of the treaty and to take action in individual cases.
Agents of the Central Intelligence Agency who have been actively involved in renditions around the world—and top US officials who have commissioned them—would be in direct violation of the treaty. Their actions have been authorized and defended by George W. Bush and other members of his administration. Last September, the US president openly acknowledged the existence of a network of secret prisons run by the CIA, and insisted that they continue to operate.
The US practice of sweeping up alleged suspects in the name of the “war on terror” has been condoned as well by US Congress, which adopted in late September the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which rubber-stamped the incarceration of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other US-run detention camps around the world—large numbers of them secret. Prisoners released from Guantanamo and other US-run prison camps have described conditions of torture at the facilities.
French officials who led the effort to institute the ban counted more than 51,000 people who have been disappeared by their governments in over 90 countries since 1980. The vast majority of these individuals—41,000—have never been accounted for and their whereabouts and fate remain a mystery.
Families of the disappeared and human rights organizations have lobbied the UN for years for an international treaty banning such abductions. Washington is determined that the role played by US intelligence agents in such disappearances remains secret and that those responsible be immune from prosecution by either US or international courts.
More
http://wsws.org/articles/2007/feb2007/rend-f09.shtml
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