Allaow: Yemen succeeds in bringing up the issue of Guantanamo

In his lecture delivered at the SCSS on Aug. 10, 2009, Mr. Mohammed Naji Allaow, the Head of the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms (HOOD), said that Yemen had been one of the first states that had brought up the issue of the detainees at the Guantanamo prison, but it had failed in negotiating for the rehabilitation of the detainees.

He also indicated that the circumstances of the issue of the detainees were exceptional to the extent that all states but Yemen had hesitated to pose such question or even to host any events dedicated to this issue; Yemen, he said, was courageous enough and had hosted the first conference devoted to the issue of the detainees. After this conference, many authorities and organizations of human rights in the Arab world started speaking out their attitudes and stances.
Elaborating on this issue, Allaow pointed out that after the first conferences spotting light on the human plight and rights of the detainees, many events and demonstrations launched to highlight the dimensions of legal and human rights on the soil of Yemen. But, Yemen, according to the Head of HOOD, does not make use of those events as it mistreats those detainees who had came back, tracks and throws them into jail without any charges. Furthermore, it could not successfully manage the negotiations with the American party over the rehabilitation of the detainees after their release; and the reason behind this failure, he believes, is that Yemen has no clear and definite projection of the rehabilitation process and has not presented any practical and complimentary program encompassing the agencies that would carry out rehabilitation activities or even estimates of the funds needed for this type of rehabilitation, which has persuaded the commission of the American lawyers in charge of the case file to choose Saudi Arabia as the place of rehabilitation in preference to Yemen