Protests were organized Friday by the London-based Amnesty International around the world to mark the Guantanamo detainees’ day. (Reuters)

By  Ismail Kamal Kushkush, IOL Correspondent

KHARTOUM — Human rights activists marked Friday, January 11, the sixth anniversary of the first orange-clad, shackled detainee to be thrown into the notorious US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay where dozens of detainees are being held without trial and incommunicado.

“I call Guantanamo the ‘camp of shame’,” Fawzi Ouseddik, an Algerian expert in international law and human rights activist, told IslamOnline.net in the Sudanese capital Khartoum.

The US sent the first terror suspect into the Cuba-based prison on January 11, 2002.

The US is holding now about 275 detainees in Guantanamo, declaring them “enemy combatants” to deny them legal rights under American legal system.

About 500 other Guantanamo prisoners have been released or transferred to other governments.

“Today, America’s Guantanamo era enters its seventh shameful year,” Anthony D. Romero, executive director of American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), wrote in an article in online magazine Salon.

Protests were organized Friday by the London-based Amnesty International around the world to mark the Guantanamo detainees’ day.

Australia kicked off the marches with hundreds of people dressed in orange jumpsuit like those worn by Guantanamo detainees took to the streets of Sydney.

In Turkey, many dressed like Guantanamo prisoners took part in a demonstration against the US detention facility at Taksim Square in Istanbul.

In the Philippines, hundreds protested in front of the US embassy to demand the closure of the US detention camp.

Outside the Law

By establishing Guantanamo, rights activists say, the US wants to have an island outside the law — a place with no lawyers, no rights and, above all, no public scrutiny.

Ouseddik, the activist from Algeria and is also the chair of an international campaign to free Al-Jazeera journalist Sami Al-Haj, said the US had developed new legal terms such as “enemy combatant” to bypass the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War.

“…We should not fight ghosts! The [US] war on terrorism has become a war on Islam and freedom of expression,” he said.

Boudjellal Bettahar, a French expert in international law, said the US has transgressed international law by its practices in Guantanamo.

“There are children in Guantanamo,” he charged.

He said there are there are three types of detainees in Guantanamo.

“The first are soldiers in the Taliban army who should be treated as Prisoners of War according to the Geneva Convention.

“Second, there are Afghan civilians, who should have not have been moved outside Afghanistan and cannot be tried outside Afghanistan,” he said.

The third type is those terror suspects of different nationalities.

“The US cannot prevent them from their right to be tried,” he said. “It (Guantanamo) has become a symbol of breaking international law.”

Australian David Hicks was the only prisoner who has been convicted. He was sent back to Australia to serve a nine-month sentence and was released last month.

Amnesty spokeswoman Katie Wood said the Guantanamo was “the tip of the iceberg”.

“What we’re opposing is the whole of the US’s detention policies and practices in the context of the ‘war on terror’ and we’re calling for human rights to be restored to the detainees,” she said in a speech.

A recent report by the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva pressed for the closure of Guantanamo, which Amnesty once said has become a “symbol of abuse and represents a system of detention that is betraying the best US values and undermines international standards.”

Posted by: Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout, info@al-amana.org