Cuba withdraws resolution regarding Guantánamo

Geneva (dpa) - Combined with severe reproaches against the USA and the European Union, Cuba has, at a meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission (HRC) in Geneva, withdrawn a resolution regarding the prisoners at the US Military base Guantánamo. The Cuban representative Jorge Ivan Mora Godoy accused Washington on Thursday of having put pressure on the HRC-members to vote against the resolution. He further said that the European Union and several Latin-American countries had made themselves into accomplices. Germany welcomed Cuba's decision to forgo a vote.

The situation of the approx. 600 prisoners on Cuba now is supposed to be discussed at the annual meeting of the HRC in 2005. According to the USA, said prisoners are supposed members of the Taliban or of the terror network El Kaida. The US denies them the status of POWs. Several of them have been imprisoned for more than two years without having been charged. Most have no legal representation.

In the withdrawn resolution the Human Rights Commission had been asked, among other things, to send inspectors to Guatanamo Bay to examine the situation of the prisoners on site. The USA had been asked to provide the information necessary.

22 Apr 04, 12:55
 

Frankly, I'm very disappointed in the German government. The mere existence of Guatanamo is a slap in the face of all the principles that determine a constitutional state. I hate all instances in which a government descends to the same level as terrorists - something both the Israeli government has done by its "liquidations" of Hamas leaders as well as the US who, after 9-11, feel it is their right to deny the most basic of human rights to selected groups of people. They may be terrorists or not - that is for a UN tribunal to decide. It is definitely no reason to fight with the same dirty weapons as they do! A properly elected government should be above that. Oh, wait, George W. Bush and his entourage weren't properly elected. Me bad.

I'd love to know how high the death toll is among the prisoners in Guatanamo Bay. If this isn't a war crime, I don't know what is.

And the wonderful Human Rights Commission is evidently just a bunch of hypocrites... what do they think? Let the prisoners stay there under God knows what conditions for one more year, and perhaps until then, the problem will magically have solved itself? Ostrich symbolism, anyone?