Unlike Britain, Australia Refuses to Take Guantanamo ‘Asylum seekers’
Citing “national security” and “immigration” reasons, Australia has formally rejected an American request to grant asylum to inmates of the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp.
This decision is in contrast to the British government, which has said that it would consider US resettlement requests on a case by case basis.
The Netherlands has also ruled out accepting any newly freed inmates, while Portugal and Germany have indicated that they might do so.
“The request received in December 2008 has been denied,” acting Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said. The Australian government had advised President George W Bush’s administration that it would not assist in resettling some 60 “war on terror” detainees.
“Assessing those requests from a case by case basis, they had not met our stringent national security and immigration criteria and have been rejected,” Ms Gillard said. It was the second time Australia has denied such a request from Washington, after rebuffing an initial approach in early 2008.
US president-elect Barack Obama has vowed once in office to close the Camp Delta facility, which currently houses 250 inmates held without charge or trial, in violation of the American constitution. For that reason, the Bush regime, with the active support of the British government and its other “allies” has kept the concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay. As it is located in an American outpost on Cuba, it is outside US legal jurisdiction.
While Australia was open to future requests from the Obama administration, Ms Gillard warned the same rigorous scrutiny and “very tough character assessments” would apply.
Ms Gillard, acting leader while Prime Minister Kevin Rudd takes a holiday, denied Australia’s stance put it at loggerheads with the incoming Obama administration. She also refused to comment on whether, as a key US ally in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Australia had a moral obligation to accept Guantanamo’s prisoners.
“We, for the future, will assess on a case by case basis, but we will always assess against our stringent national security criteria, and our stringent immigration criteria,” she responded. “The decisions we make will be against those criteria and they’ll always be in the best interests of this country.”
Recently, a former US military prosecutor Lieutenant-Colonel Darrel Vandeveld said the tribunals used to try suspects at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp were defective, immoral and “sullied” the US constitution. Vandeveld noted that the way detainees were treated at the camp in Cuba was “appalling, wrong, unethical and finally, immoral.”
“I was convinced… that it was impossible to guarantee that they would get a fair trial,” he noted.
Also recently, US rights group the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said it has filed a legal action to end US censorship of testimony by prisoners at Guantanamo Bay about torture at the hands of US officials. “It cannot be the case that a government can torture people and by virtue of having exposed them to torture techniques, cut off their communication with the world,” said Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project.
The US government has come under scathing criticism for allowing interrogation techniques that at best border on torture to be used on terrorist suspects detained indefinitely at US prisons in Guantanamo and Iraq.
Experts say torture not only produces false information (usually in the form of untrue confessions) but it is also counterproductive as it is seen as a main cause behind increased insurgencies in Iraq.
