Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 29 August

The US Government announced the first transfers out of Guantanamo in a year today, and the first since President Barack Obama promised in May to renew his administration’s efforts to close the facility. Congress’s insistence on using military commissions at Guantanamo has been an unmitigated disaster. The only two convictions obtained after full trials have both been overturned. Some Congressional Democrats estimate the cost of the facility to be $500 million per year or $2.7 million per prisoner.

Let’s hope these transfers are an indication the Obama administration will begin to fulfill the promise the president made on his second day in office– to close Guantanamo once and for all.  In Yemen, the United States has been ratcheting up drone strikes against alleged members of Al Qaeda. Many Yemeni people fear the U.S. more than they fear al Qaeda as the strikes have caused widespread anti-American sentiment. Strikes that kill civilians also play into the hands of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which by some accounts has tripled in size, to some 1,000 members, since 2009. In China, the government has undertaken a nationwide crackdown on dissent in an apparent campaign against perceived challenges to one-party rule. The crackdown is unfolding as China campaigns to be elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council, the UN’s preeminent human rights body, in November. Attorney General Eric Holder gave the governors of Washington and Colorado the green light on marijuana legalization that passed in state initiatives last November saying the Department of Justice would take a "trust but verify approach". In Tanzania, the deputy energy and minerals minister, Stephen Masele, responded to the major Human Rights Watch report released yesterday and admitted that child labor in gold mines was a “serious problem.”  On paper, Tanzania has strong laws prohibiting child labor in mining, but the government has done far too little to enforce them.