Back in September, the Pentagon announced new detainee review board (DRB) procedures for the 600 detainees being held by the US military at Bagram.
The new guidelines would assign a United States non-lawyer military official to each detainee. They would be tasked to gather exculpatory witnesses and evidence to present before review boards to be appointed by the US military.
Currently, these detainees - some of whom have been imprisoned for more than six years - do not have access to lawyers and have no right to hear the allegations against them. Their status as "enemy combatants" is theoretically reviewed periodically by military panels, but critics say these reviews are incomplete, prejudiced and ineffective.
Also announced were reforms outlined in Gen. Stanley McChrystal's August 30 assessment on Afghanistan for both US and Afghan prisons, focusing on rehabilitation and skills training of prisoners in order to prevent their radicalization, as well as on evidentiary concerns that hinder successful and fair prosecution of suspected insurgents transferred by international military forces to Afghan courts.
General McChrystal noted that "detention operations, while critical to counterinsurgency operations, also have the potential to become a strategic liability for the US and ISAF" and concluded that the "desired endstate" is to transfer all detention operations, including US, to the Afghan government provided it has the capacity to run these systems in accordance with international and national law.
"We are mindful of the significant challenges that lie ahead to accomplish the detention goals outlined by the Pentagon and we are gratified to see improved detainee review procedures replace ones that were unfair and detrimental to US counterinsurgency goals. To win back support for its mission and cooperation of the Afghan people, the United States however, must enact further reforms to US detention practices," said MuhammedAlly.
She said, "Given the lessons learned from Guantanamo, it is important that detention review procedures in Bagram must provide detainees a legal representative to ensure a meaningful mechanism for detainees to challenge their detention which the new procedures don't provide.
"It is equally important to improve the reliability of information leading to capture of an individual in order to mitigate the risks of erroneous detentions, which the new procedures do not address," she added.
MuhammedAlly called for independent, public monitoring of implementation of the new procedures in order to assess their effectiveness.
HRF's recommendations come as the newly created Joint Task Force 435 in Afghanistan undertakes its mission to oversee new detainee review procedures in Bagram and assess how to effectuate the "endstate" of transferring detention operations to the Afghan government. It also comes as the Obama administration nears the end of its own policy review and prepares to announce its strategy for Afghanistan operations.
In September, human rights activists and legal experts reacted swiftly to disclosures that the US government is planning to introduce new measures it claimed would give inmates at Afghanistan's notorious Bagram prison more opportunities to challenge their detention.
Their views ranged from cautious optimism to total condemnation.
Tina Monshipour Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network (IJN), a legal advocacy group that represents four Bagram detainees in a pending federal court case, called the proposed changes "a step in the wrong direction."
She told us, "No set of procedures will have legitimacy until there is transparency and accountability for any violations of the military's own rules. Preventing the accused from having contact with his lawyer is antithetical to any legitimate system of justice."
She said the first step should be to allow the detainees access to actual lawyers. Anything less, she added, "only invites rule-breaking and casts doubt over the legitimacy of any proceedings that may be going on behind closed doors."
"The 'new' procedures adopted by the Obama administration are not new at all; they appear to be exactly the same as the procedures created by the Bush administration in response to prior court challenges by Guantanamo detainees," she said.
