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Human Rights & National Security |
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Throughout history, human rights have been compromised and trampled on in wartime. Following the atrocities of genocide and ethnic cleansing during World War II, the United States led Europe and other Western states in constructing a framework of laws intended to prevent human rights abuses in wartime. As it faces new threats in the form of terrorism, the U.S. government must ensure that its anti-terror tactics comport with the human rights standards that it has led the world in accepting and implementing.
A number of human rights concerns have been raised by the U.S. government’s anti-terrorism policies, including:
- credible and documented allegations of torture in military and CIA custody,
- the indefinite detention of terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay,
- the use of “extraordinary rendition” to outsource torture,
- the use of secret prisons without access to Red Cross monitors, and
- the use of military courts with reduced due process protections.
Throughout this process, one of the government’s primary strategies has been to seek to prevent judicial review of these practices. Guantanamo Bay was used as a detention center on the theory, since rejected by the Supreme Court, that U.S. courts could not review the practices there because it was located outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States. More recently, the government has sought to restrict or eliminate the availability of habeas corpus remedies in terrorism cases.
For more information on these efforts, see:
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