JEDDAH, 8 January 2007 — It was on Jan. 7 five years ago that the first group of Saudi prisoners were thrown into the notorious prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Several human rights activists and legal experts from all over the world have stepped up their demands that the camp run by the US Defense Department be closed.
The camp’s existence has been a controversial matter as the United States imprisoned there hundreds of Arabs and Muslims following the war in Afghanistan in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Though the US authorities have released several detainees from the camp in groups, still the camp houses 425 prisoners of different nationalities, including 74 Saudis. These prisoners have not been tried nor have any charges been made against them.
Prominent Saudi lawyer Khaled Abu Rashid told Arab News yesterday that the demand for the release of the detainees had gained momentum as their families were becoming more and more worried about the prisoners’ plights.
“The detention camp is a disgrace to modern legal history and an outrage to human rights values,” Abu Rashid said. He added that Saudi diplomats had succeeded in getting a number of the detainees freed and hope that their efforts would be crowned with the release of the remaining ones.
“The diplomatic efforts to close down the camp which is reminiscent of the Nazi torture camps of World War II, will ultimately succeed,” he said.
Abu Rashid added that there would be no surprise if the released detainees took legal action against the violations committed by the US authorities including former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
In November, an international group of lawyers filed a lawsuit calling on German prosecutors to investigate Rumsfeld for war crimes, according to agency reports. The 220-page suit is being brought on behalf of 11 former Iraqi detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and one Saudi currently held at the US prison in Guantanamo.
German law allows the pursuit of war crimes cases regardless of where they take place in the world. A similar attempt to prosecute Rumsfeld in Germany was rejected two years ago, but the lawyer representing the detainees, Wolfgang Kaleck, told a news conference in Berlin he was confident the complaint would be followed through this time.
