Human Rights Watch says military commissions should be abandoned

   Legislation proposed by the Obama administration for the revision of military commissions would fall short of bringing full justice to persons imprisoned for alleged terrorist activities, according to Human Rights Watch.

 

     The bill introducing the changes calls detainees “unprivileged enemy belligerents” instead of “unlawful enemy combatants” but leaves questions concerning efforts to abandon military justice for civilian judicial processes. The changes were included in the defense authorization bill approved by the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee and now awaiting action by the full Senate.

            “The discredited military commissions should have been abandoned long ago,” said Joanne Mariner, Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program director at Human Rights Watch. “The Obama administration is repeating a Bush-era mistake at the expense of real justice for crimes against the United States.”

            Section 1031 of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2010 would establish procedures governing the use of military commissions to try alien “unprivileged enemy belligerents” (individuals previously labeled “unlawful enemy combatants”) for violations of the laws of war and other offenses. The measure would likely make it harder to admit evidence before the commissions derived from some – though not all – forms of coercion.

 

            Critics of Bush era tactics point out that the status of detainees is not clear in view of the vagueness of the  Bush administration’s “war against terrorism” and the use of torture and abuse against those held for alleged terrorist activities.

 
            The resort to military commissions was employed to permit trials that lack the full due-process protections available to defendants in federal courts, according to Human Rights Watch.

 

            Furthermore, many of the detainees are civilians or persons not directly involved in armed conflict--independently of their sympathy or not for terrorist movements--and therefore their prosecution before military tribunals is inconsistent with the concept of fair-trial standards. 

 

            As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama called the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay “an enormous failure.” On his second day in office, he suspended the commissions for 120 days and announced plans to close the detention center at Guantanamo within a year.

            Terrorism suspects should be prosecuted in federal civilian courts, which can try conspiracy and material support for terrorism, charges not considered war crimes, Human Rights Watch said. The federal courts have shown themselves to be fully capable of trying terrorism cases while protecting intelligence sources and the due-process rights of the accused.

 

            In the more than seven years since the military commissions were announced, only three suspects have been prosecuted, while the federal courts have tried more than 145 terrorism cases during the same period.

 

            “Anyone responsible for terrorist activity against the US should be tried in regular federal courts,” said Mariner. “Unlike the compromised military commissions, the federal courts have a long history of successfully prosecuting terrorism cases.”

 

            Additional information on HRW’s views can be obtained at

http://www.hrw.org/en/category/topic/counterterrorism/guantanamo-military-commissions