UN report calls for Guantánamo Bay closure

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The United States should close down its detention camp in Guantánamo Bay and give its detainees an independent trial or release them, a United Nations report released today suggests.

The 54-page report called on Washington "to close down the Guantánamo Bay detention centre and to refrain from any practice amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment".

The US ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Kevin Moley, said the investigation had taken little account of evidence provided by the US.

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He also said the five envoys from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights whose investigations the report was based on had rejected an invitation to visit the detention centre in the US's Cuban enclave.

The five envoys said they had turned it down because the US would not permit them to interview detainees.

Only the International Committee of the Red Cross has been allowed to speak to detainees, but the organisation keeps its findings confidential, reporting them solely to the detaining power. Some reports have been leaked by what the organisation calls "third parties".

The UN report was based on interviews with former detainees, public documents, media reports, lawyers and a questionnaire filled out by the US government. The five envoys said photo evidence alone - corroborated by testimony of former prisoners - had shown detainees were shackled, chained, hooded and forced to wear headphones and goggles.

"Such treatment amounts to torture, as it inflicts severe pain or suffering on the victims for the purpose of intimidation and/or punishment," the report said.

Some of the interrogation techniques used at the detention facility itself - particularly the use of dogs, exposure to extreme temperatures, sleep deprivation for several consecutive days and prolonged isolation - caused extreme suffering, the report said.

The simultaneous use of such methods was "even more likely to amount to torture," it said.

The report also disputes the Bush administration's legal arguments for the prison, sited at a navy base in Cuba with the purpose of remaining outside the jurisdiction of US courts.

Drafts of the UN report were leaked to the Los Angeles Times and the Telegraph newspapers, deepening the international controversy over the facility.

During an 18-month investigation, the envoys interviewed freed prisoners, lawyers and doctors to collect information on the detainees, who have been held for the last four years without access to US judicial oversight.

"We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the US government," Manfred Nowak, the UN special rapporteur on torture and one of the envoys, told the LA Times.

"There are no conclusions that are easily drawn. But we concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and conventions on human rights and torture."

The report lists techniques in use at Guantánamo that are banned under the UN's convention against torture, including prolonged periods of isolation, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, and humiliation, including forced shaving.

It also focuses on a relatively new area of concern in Guantánamo - the resort to violent force-feeding to end a hunger strike by inmates. Guards at Guantánamo began force-feeding the protesters last August, strapping them on stretchers and inserting large tubes into their nasal passages, according to a lawyer for Kuwaiti detainees who has had contact with the UN envoys.

The report adds to a body of evidence about mistreatment. A report by the International Committee of the Red Cross last year said interrogation techniques there were "tantamount to torture".