THE first United Nations independent investigator to visit Guantanamo Bay said on Monday that the 30 men still held at the site are subject to ongoing cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under international law.

The United States’ naval base in south-eastern Cuba contains the notorious offshore detention centre set up by president George W Bush during the US’s so-called war on terror. The Cuban government considers the miltary presence there illegal.

Issuing her 23-page report to the UN human rights council, the investigator, Irish law professor Fionnuala Ni Aolain, said that the 2001 attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania that killed nearly 3,000 people were crimes against humanity. 

But she said the US use of torture and rendition against alleged perpetrators and associates in the years immediately after the attacks violated international human rights law.

In many cases, the US authorities deprived the victims and survivors of justice because information obtained by torture cannot be used at trials, she pointed out.

Prof Ni Aolain said her visit marked the first time a US administration has allowed a UN investigator to visit the facility, which opened in 2002.

She said she was given access to everything she asked for, including holding meetings at the facility with so-called high-value and non-high-value detainees.

Prof Ni Aolain said significant improvements have been made to the confinement of the prisoners but expressed serious concerns about the continued detention of 30 men, who she said face severe insecurity, suffering and anxiety. 

Examples cited included near constant surveillance, forced removal from cells and unjust use of restraints.

“I observed that after two decades of custody, the suffering of those detained is profound, and it’s ongoing,” she said. “Every single detainee I met with lives with the unrelenting harms that follow from systematic practices of rendition, torture and arbitrary detention.”

Prof Ni Aolain also expressed profound concern that 19 of the 30 men remaining at Guantanamo, some of who have been in custody for more than 20 years, have never been charged with a single crime.

She made a long series of recommendations and said the prison should be immediately closed.

In a submission to the human rights council, the US said it disagrees “in significant respects with many factual and legal assertions” in her report.