European team inspecting Guantanamo says only 30-40 ‘real’ terror cases possible News
European team inspecting Guantanamo says only 30-40 ‘real’ terror cases possible

[JURIST] The head of a European inspection team tasked with evaluating the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] said Friday that there may be only 30-40 "real" cases of terrorism there and recommended that the facility be shut down by the end of 2007. Anne-Marie Lizin [official website], the president of the Belgian Senate [official website] and special representative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly [official website], the parliamentary arm of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe [official website], presented the group's findings, saying that the total number of detainees "valuable" for trial procedures could be 70-100 individuals, but only 30-40 could really be prosecuted. Lizin and her delegation visited the camp [translation of Le Soir interview] in March. One of the experts in the group commented afterwards that detainees there were treated better than in Belgian prisons [JURIST report].

Lizin's report, written before a recent release of 14 Saudi Arabian detainees [JURIST report], states that 460 detainees still remain at Guantanamo and pushes for a shutdown of the prison base due to the high number of prisoners who should not be prosecuted. While the US Supreme Court ruled [JURIST report] earlier this week that President Bush's military commissions [JURIST news archive] are illegal for Guantanamo detainees, it did not address whether the facility should be shut down. AFP has more.