At last, the United Nations has asked the United States government to shut down its detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. A 54-page report prepared by five UN experts released in Geneva on February 16, 2006 calls on Washington “to close down the Guantanamo detention centre and to refrain from any practice amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”.

Now that the UN has spoken up and the UN secretary general has publicly endorsed the report, all member states of the UN should also demand that Guantanamo be shut down immediately. There should be a global chorus of governments and civil society groups pressuring the Bush Administration to heed the voice of the peoples of the world and act in the interest of human dignity and human decency. Most of all, however, it is the good people of the United States of America itself who should urge their government to close down an infamous detention center that has denigrated and disgraced the ideals of the U.S. Constitution.

No human being with even an iota of honesty will be able to defend Guantanamo. It is not just prolonged detention without trial or systematic torture or incessant prisoner abuse that has angered the world. Prison guards and interrogators at Guantanamo are also guilty of indulging in crude and offensive acts aimed at humiliating the detainees and insulting their religious sanctities.

The UN’s principled stand on Guantanamo should prompt the world body to make other demands upon the U.S. government. It should be asked to cease forthwith its clandestine abduction-deportation-detention-cum-torture operations in foreign lands. It is now well established that a number of foreign governments in different parts of the world have been involved, directly or indirectly, in these operations. These nefarious activities bring shame to nations which claim to champion human rights.

Disclosures about clandestine abduction and deportation operations in the last few months and the Guantanamo Report have acquired urgent significance in view of recent media revelations of hitherto unexposed prisoner abuse in the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison and the brutal assault of youths inside a British military compound in al-Amarah in Iraq. In the case of Abu Ghraib, the previously unseen pictures aired over Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) seem to suggest that the torture and abuse were much worse than what was first revealed in 2004. What was particularly disturbing about the video showing the assault by British soldiers, stills of which were published in the British newspaper News of the World, was the callous indifference to the beatings displayed by other soldiers passing by at the time. Both the U.S. and British governments have assured the world that they will conduct a thorough investigation into the incidents and punish the culprits.

In the final analysis, acting against the guilty in specific instances of human rights violations is not enough. Justice will only be served when the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq ends and their attempt at global hegemony is thwarted once and for all.