UNITED NATIONS — The first U.N. independent investigator to visit the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay said Monday the 30 men held there are subject “to ongoing cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under international law.”
The investigator, Irish law professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, said at a news conference launching her 23-page report to the U.N. Human Rights Council that the 2001 attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania that killed nearly 3,000 people were “crimes against humanity.” But she said the U.S. use of torture and rendition against alleged perpetrators and their associates in the years right after the attacks violated international human rights law.
Ní Aoláin said her visit marked the first time a U.S, administration has allowed a U.N. investigator to visit the facility, which opened in 2002.
She praised the Biden administration for leading by example by opening up Guantanamo and “being prepared to address the hardest human rights issues,” and urged other countries that have barred U.N. access to detention facilities to follow suit. And she said she was given access to everything she asked for, including holding meetings at the facility in Cuba with “high value” and “non-high value” detainees.
The United States said in a submission to the Human Rights Council on the report's findings that the special investigator's findings “are solely her own” and “the United…
