The U.N. Puts America on the Hot Seat for Torture

The U.N. Puts America on the Hot Seat for Torture

https://www.aclu.org/blog/human-rights-national-security/un-puts-america-hot-seat-torture

By Jamil Dakwar, Director, ACLU Human Rights Program at 1:54pm

The eyes of the international community will be focused on the United States this week. Government representatives will appear before the U.N. Committee against Torture to defend U.S. compliance with the anti-torture treaty the United States ratified 20 years ago.

This marks the first U.N. review of the United States' torture record since President Obama took office in 2009, and much is at stake. The review will test the pledges President Obama made to reverse disastrous Bush-era policies that led to gross violations of human rights, like torture, secret and incommunicado detention, "extraordinary renditions," unfair trials, and more. It is also likely to examine practices that emerged or became entrenched during Obama's time in office, such as indefinite detention at Guantánamo, immigration detention and deportations, and the militarization of the police, as witnessed by the world during this summer's events in Ferguson.

As we have previously written, in order to meet international torture-prevention standards, the Obama administration must first unequivocally repudiate the Bush administration's dangerous and wrong position that the ban on cruel treatment doesn't apply when the United States is operating abroad. Doing so will help break with the abusive and illegal practices of the past and strengthen the global prohibition against torture and ill-treatment enshrined in the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The president should heed calls by Senators Feinstein (D-Calif.), Durbin (D-Ill.), and Leahy (D-Vt.); retired military generals; human rights groups; and even his former State Department legal advisor Harold Koh, all of whom who asked him to endorse the extraterritorial application of the convention as a matter of legal obligation, not only policy.

The U.S. delegation on Wednesday will be emphasizing the president's actions to close secret CIA detention facilities and prohibit the use of any interrogation technique not authorized by and listed in the Army Field Manual on human intelligence. But the U.N. Committee against Torture is likely to ask about loopholes or gray areas where U.S. policies are still not in full conformity with the convention.

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still reading through this, but, hey ... making me ill.