A UN human rights body told Washington yesterday that any "secret detention" centres the US was operating abroad violated international law and should be shut immediately.
Saying it had "credible and uncontested" reports of such jails, the Human Rights Committee said the US appeared to have been detaining people "secretly and in secret places for months and years".
"The state party should immediately abolish all secret detention," it said, echoing a similar demand in May by the UN Committee Against Torture.
In its findings on US observance of the UN's main political rights treaty, the committee said the International Committee of the Red Cross must be given access to anybody held during armed conflict. It could not accept Washington's argument that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights does not apply to anyone not held on US soil, it added.
Since September 11th, the US has been accused by human rights groups of operating secret detention centres in its so-called war on terror.
A report last month for the Council of Europe, the European human rights watchdog, said more than 20 European states had colluded in a web of secret CIA jails and flight transfers of terrorism suspects from Asia to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.
In an initial reply to the committee's 39-paragraph report, Washington said the committee had spent too much time on the US. "The recent committee conclusions on North Korea were about half the length of on the US," said the US mission to the United Nations in Geneva.
The UN treaty lays down individual rights, including the right to equality before the law, and protection against torture, inhumane treatment and arbitrary arrest.
"The state party [ the US] should review its approach and interpret the covenant in good faith," said the committee, in its first US review for 11 years.
The US report to the committee, submitted in October, was seven years late.
"We consider that the major violations were to do with the fight against terrorism," said French magistrate Christine Chanet, who chairs the committee of 18 independent experts.
The committee asked the US to respond to its comments within a year.
Asked what would happen if Washington took no notice, Ms Chanet, speaking in French, said: "There is a strong chance that they will ignore many of the recommendations. They are so certain about their position [ but] we can always hope for a change of attitude." The next US review is not due until 2010.
The UN body also expressed concern at the acknowledged past US use of interrogation techniques such as prolonged stress positions that could be regarded as torture.
While welcoming guarantees these were no longer used, it said it was worried that the US did not seem to see them as violations of international law. - (Reuters)