publications

I. Summary

On June 17, 2007, the United States government took two of the 355 detainees currently incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay out of their cells, loaded them onto a plane, and returned them to their home country, Tunisia.

Ten weeks later, as this report went to press, the two men—Abdullah al-Hajji Ben Amor and Lotfi Lagha—are still being held in a Tunisian prison.1 They have told those who visit them that things are so bad they would rather be in Guantanamo than where they are now.

With the push to close Guantanamo heating up—even the US Secretary of Defense has said that he would like to see Guantanamo closed—the effort to move out many of the men is in high gear. As of June 2007 the United States said that it had slated 80 detainees for release or transfer. Now the US Department of Defense is saying that 150 are eligible for release or transfer.2

For the majority of detainees, many of whom have now spent more than five years in Guantanamo without charge, this is welcome news. But for some who come from countries like Algeria, China, Libya, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan—all countries with known records of torture—home is a place that the detainees so fear that they would rather remain in Guantanamo than be returned there.3

In some cases, the US administration has found these concerns legitimate and decided not to send the detainees home. It has sent eight detainees—five Chinese Uighurs, an Algerian, an Egyptian, and a Russian—to Albania rather than return them to their home countries. And it is reportedly still trying to find a country that will accept the remaining 17 Uighurs in Guantanamo, all of whom it has concluded it cannot return to China.

But in other cases, the administration claims that it can protect against abuse and mistreatment by getting what are known as “diplomatic assurances”—promises of humane treatment—from the receiving country.4 But what protection does an unenforceable promise from a country that regularly engages in torture really provide? Human Rights Watch documented the torture and other abuse faced by seven Guantanamo detainees returned to Russia on the basis of diplomatic assurances in 2004.5 The experience of al-Hajji and Lagha in the weeks since their arrival in Tunisia provides additional cause for concern.

Human Rights Watch has long called on the US government to close the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, and we continue to do so. But the haphazard shipping of detainees like al-Hajji and Lagha to countries with known records of torture and abuse is not the way to go about that closure. The Bush administration could shut down the prison camp responsibly by providing notice of impending return to the detainees and their lawyers and an opportunity to challenge the transfer, including the nature of any assurances made by the receiving country. It is true that detainees who challenge their transfer will be extending their continued detention at Guantanamo. But they should be allowed to make that choice. Otherwise, the process of closing Guantanamo could end up condemning the detainees to a fate even worse than Guantanamo, and the US to renewed criticism and ill-will.




1 A note on the spelling of Tunisian names: please excuse inconsistencies in the rendering in Latin characters of Tunisian Arabic names. These are due to variations between the French-influenced renderings of Arabic names preferred in Tunisia and the standard English transliteration systems for rendering Arabic.

2 Richard Willing, “Lawmakers to Work on Closing Gitmo,” USA Today, July 8, 2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-07-08-lawmakers-gitmo_N.htm (accessed August 13, 2007).

3 Human Rights Watch communications with attorneys representing Guantanamo detainees (names withheld), June-August 2007.

4 See Human Rights Watch, Still at Risk: Diplomatic Assurances No Safeguard Against Torture, vol. 17, no. 3(D), April 2005, http://hrw.org/reports/2005/eca0405/, pp. 30-33, 38-41; and see also Human Rights Watch, Questions and Answers: ‘Diplomatic Assurances’ against Torture, November 2006, http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/eca/ecaqna1106/.

5 Human Rights Watch, The Stamp of Guantanamo: The Story of Seven Men Betrayed by Russia’s Diplomatic Assurances to the United States, vol. 19, no. 2(D), March 2007, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2007/russia0307/.