The UN Human Rights Committee on Friday criticized Washington on a range of issues, demanding the immediate closure of any secret detention facilities used in the war on terrorism, a moratorium on capital punishment and improved treatment of its poor and black citizens following Hurricane Katrina.
Washington said the panel was out of bounds in examining US practices outside the US, but that it would consider recommendations for domestic concerns.
The 18 independent experts who review compliance with one of the world's major human rights treaties said on Friday that the US should immediately shut down any secret detention facilities and grant prompt access to the international Red Cross to any person detained in connection with an armed conflict.
"The committee is concerned by credible and uncontested information that the [US] has seen fit to engage in the practice of detaining people secretly and in secret places for months and years on end," according to the 12-page conclusions of the committee following two days of hearings with a US delegation.
"Our initial reaction is disappointment," said US State Department official Matthew Waxman, adding that the panel appeared to ignore much of the testimony presented by the delegation he led.
The committee, which takes turns examining the performance of each of the 156 countries which are parties to the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, said that such practices also violated the rights of detainees' families.
The US "should only detain persons in places in which they can enjoy the full protection of the law," the report said. "It should also grant prompt access by the International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC] to any person detained in connection with an armed conflict."
In a conference call from Washington, US officials refused to confirm or deny reports that there have been secret detention centers in Europe and elsewhere, suggesting that there may be intelligence detention centers.
Under the Geneva Conventions the International Committee of the Red Cross is supposed to have access to all prisoners of war, but the ICRC says it knows of people who have been detained by the US in the war on terror whom they have never found in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sandra Hodgkinson, another State Department official, said, "The International Committee of the Red Cross does have access to various battlefield locations, not just in Guantanamo Bay, to meet with prisoners and detainees.
"We take very seriously their role in applicable locations and we will continue to do that," Hodgkinson said.
But she said, "I'm not going to comment in depth at all on any intelligence operations. That's not what we would normally talk about at any time."
The US maintains that the covenant was written to apply only to its national territory and does not apply to the US military or its installations abroad, which are governed by other domestic and international laws.
"Despite this clear limitation of its mandate, the committee has made at least six separate recommendations that concern US activities outside the territorial United States," US State Department legal counsel John Bellinger III said in a statement.
RSS