The Latin American Circle for International Studies (LACIS), declares publicly its satisfaction for the report that the United Nations announced on February 16, in which it demands the closing of the military center of detention administered by the United States in the bay of Guantánamo, Cuba, and urges the international community and the defenders and advocates of the human rights all over the world, to transmit clearly to the U.S. government this message: it is time to put an end to Guantánamo.
The experts of the U.N. have determined that the kind of examination and interrogatory authorized in Guantánamo, violate the Convention against the Torture, that the international law on human rights is applicable there and that the United States must submit the arrested to a fair trial, in agreement with its internal legislation, or set them free.
The LACIS believes that the government of the United States lacks any ethical, moral and political justification, to keep running the center of detention in Guantánamo, which from the first moment has violated all the norms of the international law.
But Guantánamo is only a part of a bigger problem. The United States has other centers of detention, such as the air base of Bagram, in Afghanistan, and Abu Ghraib and other jails of Iraq, and it is involved in the use of secret centers of detention in other countries, many of them governed by regimes that have been characterized by their flagrant violation of the human rights and the frequent use of the torture.
All those centers, included Guantánamo, must be subject to independent examination. All the arrested must have access to the courts and receive a human treatment. These conditions are basic principles that cannot be violated, not even in time of war or national emergency, or in the frame of the so-called global war against the terrorism. In fact, the existence of such centers is a form of terrorism of State.
Up to the date, Washington neither has allowed an independent investigation in his centers of detention in other countries, nor has been ready to cooperate with the investigation of the European Council on the so-called "extraordinary deliveries" of supposed terrorists.
The disrespect that in a selective way shows the United States towards the international law in the context of the war against terror has an enormous influence in the rest of the world. When the United States commits serious violations of the human rights, sends other governments, included the contumacious violators of said rights, the unequivocal message that such practices are permissible.
That's why the cases of Guantánamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib, are of utmost importance, because his existence itself is equivalent to a permission to violate the human rights on behalf of the combat to terrorism.