ICRC not visiting all US detainees, official confirms News
ICRC not visiting all US detainees, official confirms

[JURIST] The US State Department [official website] confirmed Thursday that the International Committee of the Red Cross [official website] does not have access to all US detainees, but said that ICRC had access to "absolutely everybody" held at Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive]. John Bellinger, top lawyer at the State Department, declined to give further details about detainees the ICRC has no access to, though he did dismiss allegations about secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe [JURIST report] as "ludicrous". In July 2004, the ICRC said it feared that the US was holding terror suspects secretly [JURIST report], outside of facilities in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq, in violation of the Geneva Conventions [ICRC materials]. Last month, advocacy group Human Rights Watch released a list of 26 'ghost detainees' [text; JURIST report] that HRW says the US has not reported but is holding incommunicado and possibly torturing. Reuters has more.