Thursday, March 12, 2015

UN torture monitor denied access to US prisons


The Guardian/AFP reports:
The United Nations’ top investigator on the use of torture has accused Washington of dragging its feet over his requested visits to prisons and refusing to give him access to inmates at Guantánamo.

Juan Méndez said he had been waiting for more than two years for the United States to provide him access to a range of state and federal prisons, where he wants to probe the use of solitary confinement.

Méndez told reporters in Geneva he wanted to visit federal prisons in New York and Colorado and state prisons in New York, California and Louisiana, among others.

He said the US state department had been working to help him gain access to the state prisons, but after two years of discussions he had yet to receive a positive answer.

“And in one of my last conversations they said that federal prisons were unavailable,” he said.

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