Julio Godoy

PARIS, Jun 3 2005 (IPS) — The French judiciary has launched an investigation into the rights of seven French prisoners who were detained at Guantanamo Bay.

The judiciary will inquire whether detention of the seven, six of whom were later transferred to France for prosecution, constituted a breach of international law.

The Paris court of appeals nominated two of its most renowned prosecutors, Sophie Clement and Nathalie Frydman Wednesday to investigate the imprisonment in late 2001 of seven French citizens at the U.S. military detention centre in Guantanamo in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

The U.S. military sent all but one of the prisoners back to France last year. All six were immediately detained by French authorities. On March 21 this year authorities released four, but kept two under detention claiming there was a risk they would disappear.

The decision Wednesday follows a lengthy debate whether French courts have the jurisdiction to inquire into U.S. human rights practices at Guantanamo where these involved French citizens.

The French inquiry will be the first probe into violations in the “lawless zone”, counsel for the former detainees William Bourdon told IPS.

Bourdon says there is a treaty of judicial cooperation between the U.S. and the French governments. “I don’t see how the Washington government can refuse cooperation with French authorities in view of the gravity of the accusations against the U.S. military.”

Bourdon and another Paris lawyer, Jacques Debray say that the U.S. government made no specific charges against the French prisoners at Guantanamo. An inquiry by the French government too did not lead to any charges.

“The legal status of the (Guantanamo) prisoners is unclear,” former foreign minister (and now prime minister) Dominique de Villepin wrote in an official note Oct. 18, 2002. “Our (U.S.) partners consider that neither the Geneva Convention nor the Vienna Convention on consular relations apply to them.”

The Geneva Convention establishes rules for the treatment of prisoners of war, and the Vienna Convention defines the terms of protection a country may provide to its citizens imprisoned abroad.

Bourdon and Debray had lodged a complaint before a court in Lyon in the south of France on behalf of the French detainees in 2002. The court rejected the complaint, arguing that it would be impossible to investigate the case given the immunity U.S. officials enjoy under international laws and treaties.

But the French supreme court of appeals annulled this rejection Wednesday and gave the green light to the inquiry.

The court ruled that French judges should “analyse…the arrest and the conditions of detention of the plaintiffs, especially in relation to the third Geneva convention of Aug. 12, 1949 and of the international treaty for the protection of political and civil rights.”

The legality of the detentions will also be debated at the 16th congress of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) in Paris Jun. 7. Hundreds of lawyers from around the world will participate.

Roland Veil who is organising the congress told IPS that “we will use international conventions to establish the legality and human rights violations of this war on terror.”

The IADL which was established in Paris in 1946 works in cooperation with several UN agencies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef).

The U.S. government has been violating the Geneva Convention and the international treaty on the protection of political and civil rights for almost four years now, U.S. lawyer Ann Fagan Ginger told IPS.

Fagan Ginger is a long-time civil rights attorney and author of the book ‘Challenging U.S. Human Rights Violations Since 9/11′, which she describes as “the first comprehensive collection of U.S. human rights violations under the justification of the so-called war on terror, from the Iraqi prison of Abu Grahib to Guantanamo, to the controls in airports.”

Under the U.S. constitution, the Geneva Convention and other international treaties protecting human rights have the status of supreme law, she said, but the government “violates them flagrantly on a scale that surpasses the worst abuses committed during the McCarthy era in the 1950s.” Many people wrongly suspected of communist leanings were blacklisted or lost their jobs under a campaign led by Senator Joseph McCarthy 1950-54.

“Even during the worst era of McCarthyism there was no Guantanamo, or Abu Ghraib,” Fagan Ginger said. Abu Ghraib is the U.S.-controlled prison in Baghdad that became notorious in April 2004 after photographs documenting torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers became public.

Fagan Ginger said the IADL congress should call for international support for the newly designated United Nations special rapporteur on human rights violations in the ‘war on terror’.

The UN Human Rights Commission decided at its assembly in April to appoint a special rapporteur “to request, receive and exchange information from all relevant societies; to identify and promote best practices on measures to counter terrorism that respect human rights and fundamental freedoms; and to work closely with other United Nations bodies.”