Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area under the watchful eyes of Military Police at Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during in-processing to the temporary detention facility on Jan. 11, 2002. Credit: Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy/public domain

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Apr 17 2013 (IPS)

Public debate here over the military prison at Guantanamo Bay heated up again following Monday’s surprise publication of a highly charged article by an inmate at the prison, one of dozens currently engaged in a months-long hunger strike over detainees’ “indefinite detention”.

The op-ed follows just days after the head U.N. official in charge of human rights, Navi Pillay, said the indefinite detention of Guantanamo Bay inmates runs counter to international law, and called again for the prison to be closed."The majority of people who are at Guantanamo right now have been cleared for release, and they have been cleared for up to six years." -- CCR's Susan Hu

“I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity,” Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a Yemeni national who has been imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for the past 11 years, wrote in the New York Times.

“I do not want to die here, but until President [Barack] Obama and Yemen’s president do something, that is what I risk every day.”

Moqbel is one of 43 prisoners at the U.S. military camp who are currently on a hunger strike.

His essay, which has received widespread attention, is not being interpreted as a plea of his innocence. Rather, many are seeing it as a testimony of the hopeless despair caused by the indefinite detention of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

The essay also adds to pressure on President Obama to close Guantanamo, a pledge he made during the first year of his presidency, in 2009. Obama is facing widespread criticism now that the Guantanamo Bay prison has surpassed the two wars his presidency inherited.

“President Obama ran on a platform that he would close down Guantanamo and bring the United States back in compliance with international human rights law – but none of this happened,” Susan Hu, a legal fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and advocacy group representing some of the Guantanamo detainees, told IPS.

“In fact, he signed an executive order in 2009 promising that he would close the prison, and he has done absolutely nothing since then to do so. Even though he has the power to transfer people out of Guantanamo right now, he hasn’t done that in the past two years and transfers have all but ceased. The men see Guantanamo as the place they will be living until they die.”

Hu says her clients have consistently said they are falling into despair, reaching a point that refusing to eat is the only way they can express their loss of hope.

She also is clear that the onus is on President Obama to act.

“I think there is widespread misconception that Congress is the obstacle to releasing the prisoners in Guantanamo, when in fact President Obama needs to be taken to task for not using his power,” Hu continues.

“The majority of people who are at Guantanamo right now have been cleared for release, and they have been cleared for up to six years. I think the only reason these men have not been released is because President Obama is not willing to risk his political capital to move toward closing Guantanamo.”

Back to Bush

Despite keeping related criticism relatively contained during his first four-year term, the situation has taken a dramatic turn following the president’s signing, in January, of a defence bill that critics claim all but abandons the pledge to close the facility.

That legislation, the National Defense Authorisation Act (NDAA), barred the transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States for any purpose, including for trial in federal court. It also required the defence secretary to meet rigorous conditions before any detainee could be returned to his own country or resettled in a third country.

“That bill requires certification from every agency that has a stake in the matter in order for a prisoner that was cleared for release to be transferred back to their home country or transferred out,” Hu told IPS.

“The bill also was used to prevent federal funding to be used to transfer prisoners into the United States – effectively barring them from federal courts. Obviously this makes it more difficult for Obama to transfer prisoners out of Guantanamo, and this has helped create the feeling of frustration among the prisoners that they will ever be transferred out.”

Previously, the U.S. government had been able to simply transfer a detainee who had pled guilty during military prosecution and served his time. But the NDAA provision effectively removed the ability to reach plea agreements or to push through promises already made to release inmates.

Yet Hu says it remains possible to transfer prisoners back to their home countries and close down the prison as Obama still has the authority to do so – despite having failed to exercise that power over the past two years.

“He is putting all the blame on Congress, when in fact he still possess the power to follow through with the his promise to close the prison,” Hu says.

“He closed the office in the State Department that was responsible for resettling the detainees, and he has not filled the White House position that is meant to oversee the closure of Guantanamo. These are all things that he could be doing right now, despite the restrictions created by the bill.”

Meanwhile, signs of the growing frustration on the part of detainees have manifested in a wave of hunger strikes in recent months, leading Guantanamo officials to engage in mass forced feedings. That process reached a new height last month when tensions escalated to become violent between detainees and prison guards.

“From what we’ve heard from our own clients there, the majority of the men in Camp 5 and Camp 6 are on hunger strike,” Hu told IPS.

“When the strike first began in Camp 6, it was all but two of the men, so that was 120 people, though now we are hearing it’s 43. We hear the guards are trying to retaliate against the prisoners on hunger strike by placing them in solitary confinement, like the conditions they were held in back in 2005.”

Guards are also reportedly moving prisoners out of communal areas and placing them en masse in solitary confinement.

“Its worrying to see that the conditions have worsened in such a way that it sort of like going back to the worse years under President [George W.] Bush, when prisoners were being abused and mistreated,” Hu says. “Today we are seeing this all over again.”

Mudjayin holds up a copy of a document identifying him as a former political detainee. Credit: Kanis Dursin/IPS

By Kanis Dursin
JAKARTA, Nov 29 2012 (IPS)

At the age of 82, former Indonesian political detainee Mudjayin wonders if he will ever see justice served.

Back in 2010, he, along with other victims of state terror, submitted their case to the recently formed human rights commission of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Two years later, they have still not received official recognition of their complaint, suggesting that the rights body lacks the necessary power or political will to carry out its mandate.

“We have still not heard anything on what they did with our report,” said Mudjayin, one of tens of thousands of Indonesians rounded up by the military following the coup attempt on Sep. 30, 1965 that saw seven army generals killed.

The army blamed that abortive coup on the Indonesian Communist Party and embarked on a campaign of mass killings, which, in the following days and weeks, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of alleged communists.

That bloody chapter in Indonesia’s history also saw the rise of Suharto as the architect of the ‘New Order’ dictatorial regime, which held power for more than three decades.

Speaking to IPS at his house in Tebet, South Jakarta, Mudjayin recalled that he was arrested without a warrant in October, 1965 and held for 14 years as a Class B detainee – meaning that no evidence to link him with the Indonesian Communist Party or the September coup had ever been established – without ever being formally charged and tried.

He was finally released in 1979, but did not demand justice until after former president Suharto stepped down in May 1998 amid massive public protests.

Aided by rights groups such as the National Committee for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), Mudjayin and other former political detainees have been seeking justice for over a decade, to no avail.

The creation of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) in 2009, the first regional rights body of an organisation that had traditionally avoided addressing issues that were seen as domestic internal matters, provided him a fresh channel through which to seek redress for his wrongful imprisonment.

Mudjayin was joined by parents and relatives of students shot dead during anti-government protests in Indonesia in 1998 and 1999, relatives of pro-democracy activists kidnapped in 1997 and 1998, relatives of 32 journalists slain in the southern Philippine province of Maguindanao in 1999, and some human rights victims from Burma.

At the time the complaint was submitted, all 10 rights commissioners representing each of the ASEAN member countries – Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – were in Jakarta to attend their first official meeting after being appointed in October 2009.

But none showed up to meet the victims, let alone to receive their complaint, Mudjayin recalled.

A limited mandate

According to Indonesian Human Rights Commissioner Rafendi Djamin, “We (AICHR) are not mandated to deal with individual claims.”

Set up in October 2009, AICHR is tasked with promoting and protecting human rights and fundamental freedoms of ASEAN peoples, enhancing regional cooperation on the promotion and protection of human rights, and upholding international human rights standards.

Rights defenders in Southeast Asia hailed the foundation of the Commission but have lamented its limited power to carry out its own mandate.

“AICHR has been given very weak terms of reference that limit its mandates, authority and powers to promote and protect human rights,” said Yap Swee Seng, executive director of the Bangkok-based Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development.

The commission’s effectiveness was further undermined when “some member states appointed government officials to the commission as their representatives, rather than independent human rights experts”, he continued.

Now, eight of the ten commissioners are government officials or diplomats. The only two independent experts are Indonesia’s Djamin, a human rights activist, and Thailand’s Sriprapha Petcharamesree, an academic.

This development has rendered the commission “institutionally problematic”, according to Kontras Coordinator Haris Azhar. “The fact that AICHR reports to the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting (AMM) indicates that the commission is not independent and that it serves as an auxiliary body to AMM,” Azhar said.

Proponents of the rights body such as Danny Chian Siong Lee, director of community affairs development in the ASEAN secretariat based here in the Indonesian capital, lauded the Commission’s efforts vis-à-vis the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration, which was adopted at the organisation’s summit in Cambodia earlier this month.

The declaration lists civil and political rights; economic, social and cultural rights; the right to development and the right to peace.

But this, too, has been the topic of much debate among Southeast Asia’s rights activists, who have criticised the draft as being too weak and setting standards that fall short of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

For Rena Herdiyani of the Women’s Crisis Centre ‘Mitra Perempuan’, the inclusion of the right to development is the document’s only saving grace, “making it different from the Universal Declaration on Human Rights”, she said.

But she also called attention to the declaration’s caveat that “the realisation of human rights must be considered in the regional and national context bearing in mind different political, economic, legal, social, cultural, historical and religious backgrounds”, making the exercise of fundamental rights highly subjective.

Further, the declaration “does not protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people or the rights of indigenous people”, Herdiyani added.

Yap criticised the commission’s lack of transparency. “The performance of AICHR in the first two years (2010 to 2011) has been unfortunately very poor, marked by an extreme lack of transparency and consultation with stakeholders in the process as well as the content of its work,” he said.

“This has been illustrated by the non-disclosure of any documents that the AICHR has adopted since its establishment in 2009, including its annual report to the ASEAN foreign ministers in 2011,” Yap added.

He also called on ASEAN to review AICHR’s terms of reference to make it truly independent with the necessary mandates and powers. “The ASEAN member states also need to provide adequate resources and financial autonomy for the AICHR to function effectively,” Yap added.

And while the rights body confronts its teething troubles, people like Mudjayin continue to wait for justice.

*This story was produced through IPS Asia-Pacific’s ‘Reporting Development in ASEAN‘series, made possible by the support of the International Development Research Centre.