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Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
Thu, September 4, 1:00 to 2:15pm, Communications Building (CN), CN 2115Abstract
On November 13, 2001, US President George Bush issued a military order on the “Detention, Treatment and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens, in the War Against Terrorism” which authorized the US to hold foreign nationals in custody without charges and prevented them from challenging their detention. On January 11, 2002, the first 20 detainees arrived at the Guantánamo Bay camp.
23 years and almost 800 detainees later, hopes for closing the “no-law” detention facilities have started fading. Even if on January 2025, former US President Biden released most detainees, the newly elected US President Trump proclaimed the rebirth of the facilities and sent the first irregular migrants to the US base. He also announced that an existing migrant detention facility at the base will be expanded to hold approximately 30,000 people.
The present paper aims at presenting the chronology of the events and political decisions leading up to the latest announcements regarding the launch of a new era for Guantánamo Bay. From a detention center for presumed criminals during the “War Against Terrorism” military campaign, it will turn into a migrant detention facility. Even if the legal frameworks of criminal law and administrative law detentions are completely different, in the present case we discover one common denominator: in Guantánamo there are no laws, neither criminal, nor administrative.
Consequently, we will (i) briefly present the history of the Guantánamo Bay detention facilities and the legal obstacles the detainees had to face to achieve release during all US administrations, (ii) question the lawfulness of the reestablishment of migrant detention centers without giving the opportunity to detainees to challenge their detention and finally, (iii) examine whether and how the international community as a whole could take action and make decisions in conformity with its human rights’ obligations against the US Trump political will and plan.