Infrastructure of Tyranny--Secret Detention

In the first part of this survey of what Conor Friedersdorf has called the "infrastructure of tyranny,"  we looked at the practice of extraordinary rendition, which is basically the art of making people disappear.  In the second part of this survey, we looked at black site prisons, or where people have been disappeared to.  In this third part of the series, we'll look at secret detention, or simply not acknowledging that a person is in your hands.

Secret detention, according to the Rendition Project, is as follows:

Whereas most detainees in the ‘War on Terror’ have been formally registered by the US authorities, and granted access to the International Committee of the Red Cross (and through them to their families), many have been held in secret. Secret detentions occur when detainees are held incommunicado (i.e., when they are not permitted any contact with the outside world, including their families, lawyers, or the ICRC), and when the detaining authorities refuse to acknowledge either the fact of the detention, or the fate and whereabouts of the detainee.

Those held in secret by the US include detainees which the US Government denies it holds, or about which it refuses to discuss. They also include those which the US Government admits to holding, where it then refuses to disclose their exact whereabouts and their current status of well-being. All of these detainees have been fully cut off from the outside world (held incommunicado), with no third party granted access to monitor the detention or speak to the detainee.

It is important to note that the detention site itself does not have to be secret for the detention to be secret. Whether the detention is secret or not is determined by its incommunicado character and by the fact that the state authorities do not disclose the place of detention or details about the fate of the detainee. This means that officially recognised detention facilities, and even secret wings within officially recognised detention facilities, can be used for secret detentions. Many also take place in facilities which are themselves unacknowledged by the authorities (i.e., are themselves secret).

This practice is also known as "forced disappearance."  Amnesty International defines forced disappearance as follows:

Enforced disappearances persist in many countries all over the world, having been a continuing feature of the second half of the twentieth century since they were committed on a gross scale in Nazi-occupied Europe.

An enforced disappearance takes place when a person is arrested, detained or abducted by the state or agents acting for the state, who then deny that the person is being held or conceal their whereabouts, placing them outside the protection of the law.

Very often, people who have disappeared are never released and their fate remains unknown. Their families and friends may never find out what has happened to them.

But the person has not just vanished.  Someone, somewhere, knows what has happened to them.  Someone is responsible.  Enforced disappearance is a crime under international law but all too often the perpetrators are never bought to justice.

Every enforced disappearance violates a range of human rights including:

• the right to security and dignity of person
• the right not to be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment
• the right to humane conditions of detention
• the right to a legal personality
• right to a fair trial
• right to a family life
• when the disappeared person is killed, the right to life

Enforced disappearance is a particularly cruel human rights violation; a violation of the person who has disappeared and a violation of those who love them...

A good place to start looking through the US's use of the practice is Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition. Al Jazeera editorializes.  Excerpts:

...Behind by the grandiose, Orwellian disguise of "extraordinary rendition", the United States and many of its allies have been engaged in executing or colluding in a practice that is nothing other than forced disappearance.

The reason, it seems clear, for the practice of "extraordinary renditions" is to allow those disappeared to be subjected to treatment that would be plainly illegal in the US. Morally it is indefensible. Strategically it is nonsensical: what could be more self-defeating in a battle to defend values than to subvert them so completely in the face of attack.

While the Obama administration has taken steps to limit the practice, some forms of it continue and there has been no attempt to reckon with past practices...

The Organization of American States has an "Inter-American Convention on the Forced Disappearance of Persons." It opens thusly:

The Member States of the Organization of American States signatory to the present Convention,

DISTURBED by the persistence of the forced disappearance of persons;

REAFFIRMING that the true meaning of American solidarity and good neighborliness can be none other than that of consolidating in this Hemisphere, in the framework of democratic institutions, a system of individual freedom and social justice based on respect for essential human rights;

CONSIDERING that the forced disappearance of persons in an affront to the conscience of the Hemisphere and a grave and abominable offense against the inherent dignity of the human being, and one that contradicts the principles and purposes enshrined in the Charter of the Organization of American States;

CONSIDERING that the forced disappearance of persons of persons violates numerous non-derogable and essential human rights enshrined in the American Convention on Human Rights, in the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;

RECALLING that the international protection of human rights is in the form of a convention reinforcing or complementing the protection provided by domestic law and is based upon the attributes of the human personality;

REAFFIRMING that the systematic practice of the forced disappearance of persons constitutes a crime against humanity;

HOPING that this Convention may help to prevent, punish, and eliminate the forced disappearance of persons in the Hemisphere and make a decisive contribution to the protection of human rights and the rule of law,

RESOLVE to adopt the following Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons...

Article II

For the purposes of this Convention, forced disappearance is considered to be the act of depriving a person or persons of his or their freedom, in whatever way, perpetrated by agents of the state or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support, or acquiescence of the state, followed by an absence of information or a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or to give information on the whereabouts of that person, thereby impeding his or her recourse to the applicable legal remedies and procedural guarantees...

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights has a Working Group dedicated to "examin[ing] questions relevant to enforced or involuntary disappearances of persons." Such tactics have been used in the past by Argentina during the Dirty War (and a great many other Latin American countries), Bangladesh, the USSR, and many others.  Apparently Mexico is having great problems with forced disappearances for a variety of reasons.  Excerpts:

When people are forcibly disappeared in Mexico, it does not necessarily mean that the victims are immediately killed. In this country of entrenched violence, forced disappearance is also a method used to feed the markets for sexual exploitation and slave labour.

Mexico has regressed “to the barbarism of Roman gladiators,” lawyer Juan López, a legal adviser to Fuerzas Unidas por Nuestros Desparecidos en México (FUNDEM), a support group for families searching for their loved ones, initially in the northern state of Coahuila and now nationwide, told IPS.

In today’s Mexico, where organised crime is rampant and public security has been militarised, forced disappearances do not follow the pattern seen in past decades in this country and others in Latin America, marked by dictatorships, “dirty wars” against opponents and armed conflicts.

These days “just about anyone” is vulnerable, López said. An unknown proportion of the victims fall prey to “illegal businesses that produce lucrative profits from an unpaid slave labour force,” he said...

It's not just the US committing "forced disappearances" in the course of the global war on terror, either.  Excerpts:

On Wednesday, UK Defense Minister Philip Hammond confirmed that 80 or 90 Afghan men are being detained without charges at the UK-run Camp Bastion—a revelation that many are calling "illegal" with obvious parallels to the United States' Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility.

According to lawyers representing eight of the detainees, a number of the men have been held for up to 14 months without charge or any indication of a trial date, and many others have not yet been allowed to consult a lawyer after months spent in prison.

"Our client has been held at Camp Bastion since August 2012. He has not been charged with any crime and has had no access to a lawyer so he can receive legal advice about his ongoing detention," said Rosa Curling, a lawyer with the firm Leigh Day, which is representing one 20-year-old detainee...

Other reports suggest these detainees have not been held secretly, but that their attorneys have been petitioning the government on various matters for some time.  With lawyers, getting anything done is difficult in the detention system.  So what happens to those who don't have lawyers--indeed, have nobody on the outside who's aware that they've been taken at all?  How can anyone try to protect your legal rights when nobody knows you've been arrested or "rendered" in the first place?

For Further Research:

• Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition
• The Rendition Project
• Amnesty International, Unlock the Truth: Poland's Involvement in CIA Secret Detention