GEOFFREY ROBERTSON QC INTERVIEW - 11th March 2009
One of Barack Obama's first acts in office was to order that the hugely
criticised US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay be closed. Widely
condemned as a gigantic stain on the US human rights record,
Guantanamo's closure within the next year is seen by many as essential
to restoring America's international name and reputation. That remains
to be seen. The more immediate problem facing both the US and the rest
of the world is what to do with the 250 or more detainees still within
its confines.
George took up the debate over 'Gitmo', as it has
become known, with renowned human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, a
former UN war crimes judge and long-standing critic of the notorious
detention compound, paradoxically in Cuba.
GEORGE NEGUS: Geoffrey, good to see you again. As a long-time
human
rights lawyer and advocate, on the human rights meter, how would you
rate the whole Guantanamo Bay episode?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON QC, HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYER: George, it has been a
disaster, it's been an utter disaster. It's been a recruiting sergeant
for terrorists because it's seen so blatantly as the place where, in
the early days under Donald Rumsfeld - between 2002 and 2004 - quite
clearly torture was used fairly extensively. After that, they gave up
water-boarding and so on, but there was still Alsatians snapping at
genitals, there was still utterly puerile forms of torture, like having
half-dressed woman come in and try to act sexually, and so on, it was
all pretty disgusting. And it's only been towards the end of the Bush
administration which bears overwhelming responsibility to this idea
that you could have some place, some legal black hole, where
international law and the Geneva Conventions didn't apply.
GEORGE NEGUS: So, other than that, not such a bad place to go
for a
break?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON QC: Well, you have got to at least give it to the
Americans, and those who are anti-American have to face up to the fact
that the Supreme Court three times smacked down the Bush lawyers. They
said, "Yeah, the Geneva Conventions do apply.” “No,
you can't get out of habeas corpus this way."
GEORGE NEGUS: I notice that you wrote soon after Barack Obama
had said
that he would close it down, you wrote that "His victory is greeted by
a world where suddenly the American flag is waving, not burning, in the
expectation that he will somehow right the wrongs of Guantanamo and Abu
Ghraib." You also thought that he would have no difficulty in closing
Guantanamo.
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON QC: There is no difficulty in CLOSING it.
GEORGE NEGUS: Right, but would do you do with the
detainees?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON QC: There are about 250 of them and in a case I
think, of about 100, there is ample evidence to put them through an
orthodox court. Some of them are thrilled at the idea. In fact, they
are saving all this - no need to argue about whether their evidence has
been obtained by torture - they WANT to plead guilty. They are thrilled
at the allegation that they had some part in 9/11 and they want to wear
it proudly as they go to their execution.
This really shows the absurdity of the death penalty with relation to
these people. They believe that being executed, preferably by being
shot by firing squad, is going to send them straight to paradise.
GEORGE NEGUS: But not all the detainees fall into that
category, of
course.
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON QC: No, now these are, if you like, the most serious
category, the category that can be put on trial and should be put on
trial in a proper courtroom. So no problem there. There are also a
group of detainees who are believed to be either crushed or reformed
and form no real danger, can be sent back to their own countries which
won't torture them but will keep them under some sort of surveillance
and they are not problematic. The real problem comes with, as you would
expect, for keeping people six years without trial - cruelly treated in
some cases - obviously these people, if they weren't fanatical,
dangerous extremists, to begin with, are going to come out at the end
of that process as fanatical, dangerous extremists. And we've had one
case - the Americans decided that one fellow called Rasul was utterly
harmless, even though the evidence against him, I think, would have
required his trial - he was clearly a Taliban bomb-maker - but they
misjudged it and sent him back, and he is now leading the Taliban in
Helmand Province.
GEORGE NEGUS: That would appear to be the fear of a number of
people in
a number of nations, Geoffrey, that there will be potential terrorists
wandering the streets. In fact, the Pentagon has said that 1 in 10, if
they can be believed, 1 in 10 Guantanamo detainees sent back to their
countries of origin have become involved in terrorist activities. One,
they say, appears to have carried out a suicide bombing, and a
spokesman for the Pentagon said 62 former inmates had been linked to
terrorism, again. So that's the problem that maybe Barack Obama didn't
anticipate.
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON QC: It is the problem. I think it is somewhat
exaggerated by the Pentagon, which of course has got to justify
Guantanamo Bay. But you don't justify it, it seems to me, in that way.
First of all, these people have to be taken back to the American
mainland. It's America's problem, and although a number of European
countries, like Ireland and Germany, are trying to help out,
nonetheless, it is primarily America's problem and America must look at
the control orders system that has been developed in Britain. Britain,
of course, was always opposed to Guantanamo Bay - took the 10 people
who had any connections with Britain back - and is therefore under no
moral responsibility because it always condemned Guantanamo Bay.
GEORGE NEGUS: We were part of the coalition of the willing -
should
this country now consider taking some detainees who won't be acceptable
anywhere else?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON QC: Well, that's a very real moral issue. The Howard
government gave unstinting support to Guantanamo Bay in a way that the
British government certainly didn't. So you could say that the
Australian Government - albeit an new Australian Government, with clean
hands, as it were - should give some support. I think the principal
responsibility must remain on America. And the way forward, probably,
is to develop the control order principle that is used for these people
in Britain. Namely, it's a form of house arrest. They are kept under
surveillance in their homes for a certain number of hours a day. Their
computers and telephones are monitored and so forth, so the danger is
reduced to virtually minimum and they are given a degree of freedom
with their family - they are not in jail - they are able to live in
other respects a normal life.
GEORGE NEGUS: Geoff, do you that it's possible - it seemed
like a good
idea at the time - but maybe Obama and his advisers, when they came up
with this idea so quickly, maybe hadn't thought it through properly?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON QC: No, they had no alternative. They had to close
Guantanamo. You've only got to look at the way America's stocks have
risen in the United Nations. America is now being elected. American
judges being elected by a majority. There is no doubt that the closure
of Guantanamo was a necessary symbolic move, to move out of the
appalling period of the Bush administration which actually had
encouraged terrorism. But, of course, the problems that Obama will face
are internal political problems. He has got to revamp some prisons -
military prisons - in California and Oklahoma in order to take them.
Well, that's a problem I think he can take pretty much on the chin.
GEORGE NEGUS: Geoffrey, with the wisdom of hindsight - legal
hindsight
in your case - is it possible that the plus that can come out of things
like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and Bagram and the whole torture
issue and the renditioning issues - is it possible out of that we might
need to revisit the whole set of conventions that we are abiding by,
even the Geneva Convention itself? Are maybe those things out of date
and not capable of handling a situation like the Bush government
decided to take on for themselves, and set aside all of those things
for the sake of what they wanted to do?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON QC: That's interesting, because the Bush
administration said, "0h, Geneva is obsolete." Of course, PARTS of
Geneva Conventions are obsolete. When I was running the UN court in
Sierra Leone, I had to draft prison rules and I went through the Geneva
Convention. Do you know what the greatest right of a prisoner was in
1949, when those conventions were passed? It was the right to smoke.
GEORGE NEGUS: The right to kill yourself?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON QC: That's right - yes, by all means update those
parts of the Geneva Convention that were drafted on the basis of the
British officers mess at Colditz prison. Yes, they are out of date. But
the essential basis of Geneva - the duty to treat prisoners with a
minimum of humanity are as contemporary and as important as they ever
were.
GEORGE NEGUS: Thanks, Geoffrey. Good to talk to you.
Unfortunately, we
are out of time. But thanks, again. It is always good to talk to you.
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON QC: All the best, George.
GEORGE NEGUS: And he's got a book of his own on human rights
in this
country out shortly.