GENEVA: Force-feeding hunger strikers is a breach of international law, the UN’s human rights office said yesterday, as US authorities tried to stem a protest by inmates at the controversial Guantanamo Bay jail.

“If it’s perceived as torture or inhuman treatment — and it’s the case, it’s painful — then it is prohibited by international law,” Rupert Coville, spokesman for the UN high commissioner for human rights, said.

Out of 166 inmates held at the prison at the remote US naval base in southeastern Cuba, 100 are on hunger strike, according to the latest tally from military officers. And of those, 21 detainees are being fed through nasal tubes.

Coville explained that the UN bases its stance on that of the World Medical Association, a 102-nation body whose members include the United States, which is a watchdog for ethics in health care.

In 1991 the WMA said that forcible feeding is “never ethically acceptable.”

“Even if intended to benefit, feeding accompanied with threats, coercion, force or use of physical restraints is a form of inhuman and degrading treatment. Equally unacceptable is the force-feeding of some detainees in order to intimidate or coerce other hunger strikers to stop fasting,” it said.

That WMA ruling followed a 1975 declaration that artificial feeding methods should never be used without a prisoner’s permission, and that a prisoner had the right to refuse all food if a physician considered the individual capable of “unimpaired and rational judgment” about the consequences.

Artificial feeding can be used if a prisoner agrees to it, or if the detainee is ruled unable to make a competent decision and left no unpressured advance instructions refusing it, according to the WMA.

The hunger strike, which is now into its 12th week, has upped the pressure on Washington to shut what President Barack Obama has called a legal “no man’s land.”

Strike still on

The Guantanamo Bay hunger strike is apparently still on despite President Barack Obama’s renewed vow on closing the prison on the US base in Cuba.

A US military spokesman says there are still 100 prisoners refusing to eat as of Wednesday. Lt. Col. Samuel House says 23 are being force fed to prevent starvation.

House said the prison camps appeared calm a day earlier as word spread that Obama on Tuesday had said at a news conference that he would try to persuade Congress to end the restrictions that have prevented his administration from emptying the prison that now holds 166 men.

A lawyer visiting the camps this week said that he doesn’t think the hunger strike will end until the US resumes transferring prisoners out of Guantanamo.

Cuba’s foreign minister demanded yesterday that Washington shut its controversial jail at Guantanamo Bay and return the long-held military base to Havana.

The comments by Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva came a day after US President Barack Obama vowed again to shut the military prison, saying it was damaging US interests.

“We are deeply concerned about the legal limbo that supports the permanent and atrocious violation of human rights at the illegal naval base in Guantanamo, a Cuba territory that was usurped by the United States, a center of torture and deaths of prisoners who are under custody,” Parrilla said during a review of Cuba’s own rights record.

He said 160 people had been detained in Guantanamo for 10 years , “without any guarantees, without being tried by a court or the right to legal defense.”

“That prison and military base should be shut down and that territory should be returned to Cuba,” he said.

The hunger strike, now into its 12th week, has heightened the pressure on Washington to shut what Obama has called a legal “no man’s land.”