Skip to main content

Britain has its own Gitmo

The US has Gitmo.   There are also variously described camps dotted throughout Europe.   Australia has detention camps for so-called illegal migrants.   There are many in the Oz camps, having been classified as refugees by the UN but detained indefinitely.

Now it's revealed that the Brits are in on the "act" of detaining people, without any charges levied, let alone a trial.

"On Wednesday, UK Defense Minister Philip Hammond confirmed that 80 or 90 Afghan men are being detained without charges at the UK-run Camp Bastion—a revelation that many are calling "illegal" with obvious parallels to the United States' Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility.

According to lawyers representing eight of the detainees, a number of the men have been held for up to 14 months without charge or any indication of a trial date, and many others have not yet been allowed to consult a lawyer after months spent in prison.

"Our client has been held at Camp Bastion since August 2012. He has not been charged with any crime and has had no access to a lawyer so he can receive legal advice about his ongoing detention," said Rosa Curling, a lawyer with the firm Leigh Day, which is representing one 20-year-old detainee.

Camp Bastion is located in Afghanistan's Helmand province and is the largest British military base in the country, housing nearly 30,000 servicemen and women. According to the attorneys, the detainees were arrested by British soldiers during village raids in Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

According to rules of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), within which the British forces in Afghanistan are operating, suspects can be legally detained for 96 hours except in "exceptional circumstances," during which they can be held for longer periods.

BBC News reports that legal documents seen by the news outlet suggest that the Afghans are being held at the base in a temporary holding facility, despite previous claims by the UK's Ministry of Defense that ISAF has "neither the power nor the facilities to intern detainees in Afghanistan."

"This is a secret facility that's been used to unlawfully detain or intern up to 85 Afghans that they've kept secret, that Parliament doesn't know about, that courts previously when they have interrogated issues like detention and internment in Afghanistan have never been told about - completely off the radar," said attorney Phil Shiner.

"It is reminiscent of the public's awakening that there was a Guantanamo Bay," he continued. "And people will be wondering if these detainees are being treated humanely and in accordance with international law."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...
6 comments
Read more