A
credibility boost for the Red
Cross By Alexander Casella
GENEVA - Last week's publication by the Wall
Street Journal of a confidential report by the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to
United States authorities in Iraq confirming allegations
of serious mistreatment of civilian prisoners by US
forces has created considerable concern in Geneva within
Red Cross circles. Paradoxically, however, the
publication of the report, which was in violation of all
the confidentiality rules under which the ICRC operates,
has contributed in no small measure to the preservation
of the credibility of the all-Swiss organization.
According to its standard rules of procedure,
the ICRC, in its capacity as the custodian of the Geneva
Conventions which protect both prisoners of war and
civilian detainees held by an occupying force, is
entitled to visit civilian jails and does so provided
that two conditions are met: first the visits must occur
on a regular basis and, second, the ICRC delegates must
be permitted to interview the detainees in private
outside the presence of their jailers. Subsequent to the
visit, the ICRC submits to the detaining party a report
on the conditions of detentions which identifies
shortcomings and suggests improvement if relevant.
As a matter of principal, the ICRC does not
pronounce itself on the reasons for detention but only
addresses material conditions under which prisoners are
held. The prerequisite of this system is
confidentiality. Reports on the conditions of detention
are never publicized and are only given to the detaining
party. However, if the detaining party chooses, as it is
entitled to, to make part of the report public, the ICRC
will then publicize the full report. "We are not Amnesty
International" is often the reply by the ICRC to those
who question why it does not go public with its reports.
Ultimately, the philosophy of the ICRC is that it is not
an advocacy organization and that its mission is to
obtain a physical improvement in the conditions of
detention for the individual prisoner, rather than to
take a public stand which has a slim chance of
translating into practical results for the victims.
While the ICRC has always sought to make it
clear that it is not an advocacy organization, its role
has been more often than not misunderstood, including in
its native Switzerland. Thus in the wake of the
revelations that US forces in Iraq had been
systematically mistreating Iraqi prisoners, part of the
local press started demanding that the ICRC "speak out".
"Last year," commented an ICRC delegate, "we
visited 460,000 prisoners in 1,120 jails in 80
countries. The moment you go public," he added, "you
stand a fair chance of being denied access to the
prisons and ultimately it is the prisoners who pay the
price."
The publication by the Wall Street
Journal of the ICRC report on Iraq comes, in a perverse
way, at an opportune time for the ICRC. Based on a total
of 29 visits to 14 Iraqi prisons between March and
October 2003, the report describes a policy of
systematic mistreatment and humiliation of prisoners in
US detention. It demonstrates that, far from being only
a silent observer, the organization did undertake,
albeit not publicly, to ensure that the US abide by its
international obligations as regards the treatment of
civilian detainees.
While the ICRC will not
comment on the details of the report, it has confirmed
that, in its view, those actions which it qualified as
"tantamount to torture" were not isolated accidents but
in the words of its director of operations, "part of a
system". The ICRC also confirmed that the content of the
report had been the subject of both written and oral
communications with the US authorities in Iraq and that
it had been the subject of a face-to-face meeting
between ICRC representatives and L Paul Bremer - the US
administrator in Iraq - in Baghdad on February 26.
While the full political fallout of the
revelations is yet to materialize, diplomatic observers
in Geneva have not failed to notice that, at the current
yearly meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human
Rights, the US delegation, which in past years had stood
out as the single most vocal defender of human rights,
has been oddly silent.
(Copyright 2004 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
