The International Committee of the Red Cross said Wednesday it had sent a delegation to check conditions at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, where over two dozen “War on Terror” detainees are on hunger strike.
“The ICRC initially had planned to start visiting individuals detained at Guantanamo from April 1, for a period of two weeks,” spokesman Bijan Farnoudi told AFP.
“But in order to better understand the current tensions and the ongoing hunger strike, we decided to bring it forward by a week,” he said.
The two-member team from the Geneva-based humanitarian organisation includes a doctor.
As of Friday, 26 detainees were on hunger strike — nearly double the number from a week earlier — with eight on feeding tubes, according to authorities at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
But lawyers representing most of Guantanamo’s 166 prisoners have said the majority of the detainees held in Camp 6, which houses 130 prisoners, are on hunger strike.
They have said the strike is a protest against the prisoners’ indefinite detention without charge and the diminishing prospects that the infamous site will be closed.
Under the Geneva Conventions governing warfare, the ICRC is the organisation empowered to check on the treatment of prisoners.
The Guantanamo facility was opened in 2002 to house prisoners rounded up in the “War on Terror” waged by President George W. Bush administration following the 9/11 attacks.
The hunger strike was launched at Guantanamo’s Camp 6 on February 6, when a “routine” inmate search took place, according to Captain Robert Durand, a prison spokesman.
Detainees said guards had inspected their Korans, which they perceived as “religious desecration,” he said.
Camp 6 houses inmates who pose no particular threat and have no special value in the eyes of US authorities.
They include 56 Yemenis who cannot return home because of a moratorium imposed by President Barack Obama after attacks plotted in recent years by Al-Qaeda’s Yemen-based affiliate, which has counted former Guantanamo inmates among its ranks.
Obama moved to close the controversial facility in 2009, but his plans to try suspects in US civilian courts were stymied by Congress.
ICRC sends staff to check Guantanamo hunger strikers
