(AFP) – UN experts on Wednesday said the United States appears to be intentionally denying due process rights to the over 250 Venezuelan and Salvadorans deported to languish in “inhumane” conditions in a Salvadoran prison. US President Donald Trump’s administration has paid El Salvador millions of dollars to lock up scores of migrants it says are criminals and gang members, in a maximum security prison with a history of alleged human rights violations.
Trump invoked an antiquated American law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to defend his order to expel Venezuelans to El Salvador without trial, accusing them of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But nearly 20 independent United Nations rights experts charged in a statement that “in many cases, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 seems to have been misapplied to deny due process, independent review and court access, contrary to international human rights law”.
The experts, who are mandated by the UN Human Rights Council but who do not speak on behalf of the United Nations, charged that “the lack of due process resulted in arbitrary deportation decisions against many people who were reportedly not involved with gangs”.
They questioned the legal criteria for applying the act. “There has plainly been no ‘invasion’ or ‘predatory incursion’ of the US by any foreign State, as required by the Act,” they said, adding that “even if some individuals were gang members, gang activity is a crime, not an act of war”. The experts, including the special rapporteurs on torture and on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism, decried “the summary nature” of the deportation decisions. These were “clearly inadequate to determine if people were at risk of serious human rights violations in El Salvador”, they said.
Dozens of civil rights organisations and legal professionals also called on the United Nations to take immediate action over that move. The deal between Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele is a “blatant violation of international human rights obligations”, groups including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in a joint letter to UN chief Antonio Guterres on Tuesday. Despite a US Supreme Court order barring the Trump administration’s interpretation of the Act, El Salvador has locked up the deportees in CECOT, a high security mega-prison, in exchange for $6 million.
El Salvador is holding the deportees “on shady detention grounds,” warned Alice Jill Edwards, the UN special rapporteur on torture. There is a real risk, she told AFP, “that this prison in particular may become the next Guantanamo-like holding station”. “These arrangements between states to move people out of their jurisdiction have led to all kinds of problems, … (leaving) individuals stuck in an essentially legal black hole.”
She added: “El Salvador’s prisons are quite well known for … torture and ill treatment, inter-prisoner violence, (and) there have been reports of suspicious deaths.” The conditions in CECOT meanwhile appear to be particularly bad and overcrowded, she said, decrying images of men held in cages. “Holding anybody in metal cages is inhumane.”
Independent monitors need to be allowed in and El Salvador has to “establish a process of review and release,” she added. “They cannot let people just be warehoused in their prisons without any form of judicial procedures, judicial oversight,” she said, rejecting El Salvador’s assertion that it was not responsible for the deportees it is holding for Washington. “You cannot delegate out your human rights obligations,” she said. “When people are in your territory, they fall under your responsibility.”
In their statement, the experts also voiced outrage that the US and El Salvador have refused to return individuals found by US courts to have been illegally deported. “We call on both Governments to cooperate to return them to the US, as well as anyone else who was unlawfully deported and wishes to go back,” the experts said.
– Nina LARSON
© 2024 AFP
