UN envoy rips US violations in Iraq, Guantanamo, Afghanistan & U.S. Too

Tweet Portion below; whole thing here:
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=93682

UNITED NATIONS: After a two-week fact-finding tour of US prison and detention facilities, a UN human rights investigator has blasted the administration of President George W. Bush for a rash of shortcomings in the country's flawed justice system and continued violations of the rule of law.

Unleashing a stinging barrage of attacks, Professor Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary and arbitrary executions, singles out the existence of racism in the application of the death penalty in the United States, and the lack of transparency in the deaths of prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay detention facility housing suspected terrorists.

Alston, a professor at the New York University School of Law and an outspoken critic of human rights abuses worldwide, also complains about the non-availability of information on civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the refusal of the US Justice Department to prosecute private security contractors who commit unlawful killings.

During his 14-day tour of the United States at the invitation of the administration, he met with federal and state officials, judges and civil society groups in New York, Washington DC, Alabama and Texas.

Alston was particularly critical of the state of Texas which has refused to review the cases of foreign nationals on death row, most of whom had been deprived of the right to consular assistance from their home countries.

He specifically chose to visit Alabama "because it has the highest per capita rate of executions in the United States, and Texas because it has the largest number of executions and prisoners on death row." Still, 129 individuals waiting on death row have been exonerated across the United States, since 1973, and the number continues to grow.

"Indeed, while I was in Texas, the conviction of yet another person on death row was overturned by the Court of Criminal Appeals," Alston said.

While in this case DNA testing ultimately prevented the execution of an innocent man, Alston said, others may have been less fortunate.

"In Texas, I met a range of officials and others who acknowledged that innocent people might have been executed," he said, adding the problem is that a criminal justice system with recognized flaws that the government refuses to address will always be capable of mistakes.

In his report, Alston points out that studies across the United States also suggest racial disparities in the application of the death penalty. In particular, many studies suggest that a defendant is more likely to receive the death penalty when the victim is white, and some studies also suggest that a defendant is more likely to receive the death penalty if he is African American.

"When I raised this issue with federal and state government officials, I was met with indifference or flat denial," said Alston, who noted that many officials wrote off the results of studies showing racial disparity as being biased because they were written by researchers with anti-death penalty views. "Given what is at stake, there is a need for governments at both the state and federal levels to revisit systematically the concerns about continuing racial disparities," he added.

Meanwhile, to date, just six of the "enemy combatants" detained at the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have been charged with capital offenses under the Military Commissions Act (MCA). They are being tried before military commissions on war crimes charges, and if convicted, face the death penalty. According to Alston, the United States has an obligation to provide fair trials which afford all essential judicial guarantees.