LONDON (AP) - U.S. plans to use a military tribunal to prosecute terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is unacceptable because it would not provide a fair trial by international standards, Britain's attorney general said. "There are certain principles on which there can be no compromise," Lord Goldsmith said in copy of a speech he planned to make to the International Criminal Law Association on Friday. "Fair trial is one of those, which is the reason we in the UK have been unable to accept that the U.S. military tribunals proposed for those detained at Guantanamo Bay offer sufficient guarantees of a fair trial in accordance with international standards."
| "International standards": is that the same sort of oxymoron as "United Nations Human Rights Commission"? |
Two of the four British nationals still held at Camp Delta - Feroz Abbasi of London, and Moazzam Begg of Birmingham - were among Bush's initial list of six people to be tried by the tribunal. In the past, Goldsmith and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw have said the United States should either try the British detainees at Guantanamo in accordance with international standards or return them to their homeland. Straw has said "the military commissions as presently constituted would not provide the process which we would afford British nationals."
| So advise your nationals not to be taken prisoner while fighting the US in far-off lands. |
The United States says the prisoners are "enemy combatants" not prisoners of war, and can be tried by military tribunals. But human rights groups wholly in thrall to the LLL have called the detentions is unlawful. |