President-elect Barack Obama should implement “an unqualified return to America’s established system of justice for detaining and prosecuting suspects” when he fulfills his pledge to shut down the Guantánamo Bay prison camp and military commissions, four leading rights organizations said in a letter released today.

Burma’s military government has used the country’s legal mechanisms to intimidate political prisoners and to deny them access to justice

Closing Guantánamo will not be easy. As David Cole points out, some of the detainees held there cannot be sent back to their home countries, and others are too dangerous to release. But while he insists that outsourcing the problem is not an option, he seems all too willing to bring the problem home.

The Ethiopian government should immediately free 53 ethnic Oromos arrested several weeks ago on allegations of support for terrorism if it cannot credibly charge them, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch said that a court should not grant further police requests to extend their detention without charge past a December 1, 2008, deadline, in part because of serious risks of torture.

The British government should immediately halt plans to deport foreign terrorism suspects to countries that offer unreliable promises not to torture them.

The United Kingdom should heed calls in a critical UN report to drop proposals to detain terrorism suspects for 42 days without charge.

At least 10 victims of the 2007 Horn of Africa rendition program still languish in Ethiopian jails and the whereabouts of several others is unknown.