About 270 Ex-Detainees Get 'Deeply Flawed' Justice in Afghanistan
About 270 detainees held by the United States have been transferred to Afghanistan where they face trials without due process rights or longtime detention without a hearing.
About 50 detainees were transferred from Guantanamo and 220 from the Bagram air base in Aghanistan, the Washington Post reports. Many are being held in the high-security Block D of a prison near Kabul that was built with U.S. aid.
Jonathan Horowitz, an investigator at One World Research, told the Post that many former Guantanamo detainees remain in indefinite detention just as they did at the U.S. facility in Cuba. “These people have been thrown into a deeply flawed process that convicts people on inadequate evidence and breaks numerous procedural rules of Afghan law and human rights standards,” he said.
The detainees often have no access to lawyers or the evidence against them, human rights groups said. The trials often last less than an hour and are based on summaries of allegations by the U.S. military, according to a report released last week.
Sandra Hodgkinson, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, told the Post that 83 cases of former U.S. detainees have been tried in Afghan courts. About 80 percent have been convicted. She said the United States does not have control over the Afghan trials.
About 20 Block D detainees who were frustrated at the failure to receive trials sent a petition to Afghan officials asking for answers. Hayatullah al-Hashimi, a former deputy justice minister who visited the prison, told the newspaper that several detainees later sewed their mouths shut with wire and thread and went on a hunger strike to protest their confinement. They began to eat again after Afghan President Hamid Karzai sent a government delegation to the prison and promised to review their cases.
The panel has reviewed 120 cases since late February and of that number, the findings are expected to result in the release of more than 50 detainees and the retrial of more than 30 others. Another 137 cases await review.
