“The United Nations says it has learned of serious allegations that the US is secretly detaining terrorism suspects, notably on American military ships,” reports the BBC. “The special rapporteur on torture Manfred Nowak said the accusations were rumours at this stage, but urged the US to co-operate in an investigation.”


Nowak says that “the UN wants lists of the places of detention and those held. The comments come five days after the UN accused the US of stalling on their requests to visit Guantanamo Bay.” (See BoomanTribune story on June 23.)


Below, more news. And who is Manfred Nowak?

He told the BBC there were a number of allegations from reliable sources that the US was holding terrorist suspects in secret places of detention, including vessels abroad.

He said that according to the reports, the ships were believed to be in the Indian Ocean. Mr Nowak said the charges of secret detention camps were very serious, amounting to enforced disappearances.

Who Is Manfred Nowak?


From the International Commission of Jurists Web site:

Prof. Manfred Nowak was elected to the Commission in May 1995.


He is Professor of Constitutional Law and Human Rights at the University of Vienna and Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights (BIM). Since 1996, he has served as Judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo and, since 2000, as Chairperson of the European Master Programme on Human Rights and Democratization (EMA) in Venice. From 1987 to 1989, he was Director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) at the University of Utrecht, and from 2002 to 2003 Olof Palme Visiting Professor at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (RWI) at the University of Lund.
Prof. Nowak was a member of the Austrian delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights for many years, before he was appointed in 1993 as expert member of the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances. During this term he also served as UN expert on missing persons in the former Yugoslavia, and after his resignation in 2001 he was appointed UN expert on legal issues relating to the drafting of a binding instrument on enforced disappearances. He also advises the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on poverty reduction strategies.


Prof. Nowak is a board member of various international and Austrian NGOs and was appointed in 2000 chairperson of a Human Rights Commission at the Austrian Ministry of Interior with the task of monitoring the police. In 1994, he was awarded a UNESCO prize for the teaching of human rights. He has published more than 350 books and articles in the fields of human rights, public law and politics.
Prof. Nowak holds an LLM from Columbia University in New York and a PhD from Vienna University.


From a June 23 NYT story on the U.N. team’s accusations that the U.S. is “stalling” on allowing them to visit Guantanamo:

“Such requests were based on information from reliable sources of serious allegations of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees, arbitrary detention, violations of their right to health and their due process rights,” the four, all independent authorities who report to the United Nations on rights abuses, said in a statement issued in Geneva.


One of them, Manfred Nowak of Austria, a professor of constitutional law and director of a human rights institute at the University of Vienna, said that mounting an unassisted investigation was “standard procedure” when countries resisted cooperating.

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