June 24, 2005
U.N. Team Accuses U.S. of Stalling on Request to Visit Detainees
By Warren Hoge 
UNITED NATIONS, June 23 - A team of four United Nations human rights experts accused the United States today of stalling on requests over the last three years to visit detainees at Guantánamo Bay and said it would now begin its own investigation without American assistance.
Such requests were based on information from reliable sources of serious allegations of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees, arbitrary detention, violations of their right to health and their due process rights, the four, all independent authorities who report to the United Nations on rights abuses, said in a statement issued in Geneva.
One of them, Manfred Nowak of Austria, a professor of constitutional law and director of a human rights institute at the University of Vienna, said that mounting an unassisted investigation was standard procedure when countries resisted cooperating.
In a telephone interview from Geneva, he said the investigation would take six months, and he warned of the consequences of noncooperation. At a certain point if we have no opportunity to make independent assessments, you have to take well-founded allegations as proven in the absence of a clear explanation by the government concerned, he said.
The Pentagon says it is holding 540 foreign terror suspects in Guantánamo, most of whom were detained in Afghanistan.
The statement was accompanied by a chronology of requests since January, 2002, in which the United States initially turned aside the notion of a visit to Guantánamo Bay and then, in the past year, agreed to meetings to discuss the possibility.
Mr. Nowak said that he had emerged from a session in Geneva on April 4 with Pierre-Richard Prosper, the United States ambassador for war crimes issues, thinking that the chances of a positive American response had markedly improved. He said the team was told that its request was being considered at the highest levels.
On April 21, according to the four experts' statement, the team sent requested details to Washington, and on May 20 received a response saying the visit was still under serious consideration.
On May 31, the four asked that some decision be made by June 15 because of their need to report to a meeting scheduled in Geneva this week. When they heard nothing back, Mr. Nowak said, they decided to issue their statement.
The lack of a definitive answer despite repeated requests suggests that the United States is not willing to cooperate with the United Nations human rights machinery on this issue, the statement said.
It also noted that the United States, in making proposals to overhaul the Human Rights Commission, had argued that country visit requests by rights experts should be granted in a timely fashion.
Mr. Prosper, reached by telephone in San Francisco, said the United States had been unable to meet the June 15 deadline but intended to keep the matter open. This is an issue that we continue to examine, he said. There are various complexities, and we hope to give them a conclusive response to their request.