[JURIST] The US military prison for terror suspects at Guantanano Bay, Cuba [JURIST news archive] drew renewed criticism from rights defenders Tuesday as the camp approached the fifth anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees from Afghanistan. Terry Davis [CV], Secretary General of the Council of Europe [official profile], the European rights watchdog organization, called [text] Tuesday for all the mostly uncharged detainees to be tried in courts of law:

If individuals are suspected of terrorist activities, they should be properly tried in a court of law- if not, they should be released, and the detention camp, set up five years ago this Thursday, should be immediately closed down...If we want to defeat terrorists, we must remain faithful to our ideas and values...We cannot win the war against terror with secret prisons, with torture, with inhuman and degrading treatment, with people being kept in a legal limbo and deprived of safeguards which are the foundation of our systems of justice and our democracies. These methods are exactly what terrorists want. They want us to give up the most fundamental, defining features of our freedom...