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British lawyers call for urgent action on Guantanamo juveniles

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, May 12, IRNA -- Leading British lawyers Tuesday called on the US Attorney General to take urgent action over those still detained in Guantanamo Bay, who were captured as juveniles.

The Bar Council, the Law Society, the Criminal Bar Association, the Commonwealth Lawyers’ Association and the Bar Human Rights Committee said that they were sending a letter to Eric Holder following repeated calls from the UK’s legal profession.

Among those detained include young Canadian, Omar Khadr, and an Afghan, Mohammed Jawad, both detained without trial by the United States military since 2002, and who have now spent nearly a third of their lives in US detention in breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

“The lengthy detention, and putting on trial for war crimes, of someone who appears to be a ‘child soldier’ is contrary to the special protection to which Khadr and Jawad are entitled by virtue of the Optional Protocol, which provides for the rehabilitation and social reintegration of former child soldiers,” said Bar Council chair Desmond Browne.

Browne said the British lawyers were hoping that the new Obama Administration “will take this opportunity to reconsider the detention of those held in Guantanamo who were captured as juveniles.”

President of the Law Society, Paul Marsh said the “ad hoc process devised by the United States under the previous administration to try so-called ‘enemy combatants’ is both illegitimate and irreparably flawed.”

“It has no basis in international law and contravenes well established laws of war and humanitarian law,” Marsh said in a statement obtained by IRNA.

“Prosecution in this system, and indeed any system of military tribunals, is grossly unsuited to meeting the requirement of the Optional Protocol to provide for the rehabilitation and social reintegration of former child soldiers such as Mr. Khadr and Mr. Jawad,” he said.