Following United States president-elect Barack Obama’s promise to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, leading human rights organizations have called upon European governments to provide humanitarian protection to detainees who fear torture or other serious human rights violations upon return to their country of origin. The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Human Rights Watch, Reprieve, Amnesty International and the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR) pressed governments to work with the new US administration to facilitate the closure of the prison.

“Everyone appears to rightly agree that Guantanamo must be closed, and president-elect Obama has said that he will close it,” said Daniel Gorevan, Counter Terror with Justice campaign manager at Amnesty International. “Other governments can help make this happen by offering protection to individuals who cannot be released to their own countries. This would have a double effect: helping to end the ordeal of an individual unlawfully held in violation of his human rights, and helping end the international human rights scandal that is Guantanamo.”

The organizations agree it is primarily the responsibility of the United States to find solutions for the men imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, being the country that has brought them to the detention facility beginning in 2002 and has held many of them there since. If the United States does not charge and try prisoners in ordinary US courts, and cannot release them to their own countries safely, it should immediately offer them an opportunity to be released into the United States, said Human Rights Watch.

However, they suggested European governments could provide much-needed assistance by agreeing to take in some of the fifty detainees who cannot lawfully be sent back to their countries of origin - including China, Libya, Russia, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan – because of the real risk of persecution and the potential for human rights violations against them in those countries.

Seventy-seven members of the European Parliament recently issued a joint call to EU Member States to offer relocation for Guantanamo detainees, mobilized by FIDH and the CCR. 

“This is a key opportunity for both sides of the Atlantic to move beyond the misguided acts of the ‘war on terror’: rendition, secret detention, and torture,” said Cori Crider, staff attorney at Reprieve. “One of Reprieve’s clients was sent back to Tunisia, drugged, hit, and threatened with the rape of his wife and daughter. Another is fighting, even now, to stay in Guantanamo because Tunisia threatened him with ‘water torture in the barrel.’ Europe can send a powerful message by reaching out to Obama and providing a safe alternative for these few people.”