GENEVA, June 23: United Nations human rights investigators on Thursday accused the United States of stalling on their request to visit foreign terror suspects at the US-run prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay.

The United States had not replied to a year-long request to probe ‘serious allegations of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment’, arbitrary detention and violations of detainees’ right to health and due process at Guantanamo.

“The lack of a definitive answer despite repeated requests suggests that the United States is not willing to cooperate with the United Nations human rights machinery on this issue,” they said in a statement which pointedly declared that no state was above international human rights law.

Manfred Nowak, UN special rapporteur on torture, said he had received ‘numerous allegations of torture and ill-treatment’ of detainees at the US naval base at Guantanamo, Cuba.

“At a certain point you have to take well-founded allegations as proven in the absence of a clear explanation by the government concerned,” he told a news conference.

The fact the UN investigators had been denied access for so long was ‘an indication that there are certain conditions they want to hide from the public’, he added.

Paul Hunt, UN special rapporteur on the right to physical and mental health, cited reports of a ‘worrying deterioration in the mental health of many detainees’, dozens of suicide attempts and coercive interrogation methods including sleep deprivation.

Their request to visit all US-held detainees abroad followed a scandal sparked by photographs taken in the US-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, showing inmates, some in hoods, being sexually humiliated by soldiers and intimidated with dogs.

Activists have expressed alarm that many people arrested since the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on America have been held for more than three years without being charged, some incommunicado, in a legal black hole that they say facilitates mistreatment.

The UN investigators said they would conduct their own investigation on Guantanamo and draw up a report by year-end.

The investigators, who report to the UN Commission on Human Rights, held talks in early April with Pierre-Richard Prosper, acting US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues.

Washington replied on May 20 saying the request was ‘still under serious consideration’, but the UN investigators said on Thursday that ‘ample time’ had now elapsed for a response.

Both Nowak and Leila Zerragoui, who chairs the UN working group on arbitrary detention, said they had come away from the talks with the impression that a visit would be granted in 2005.

“The request for a visit to Guantanamo Bay is still under serious review,” a US spokeswoman in Geneva told Reuters on Thursday.

Nowak, an Austrian law professor, confirmed that the US delegation had raised concerns over his own requirement to interview detainees in private.

The Pentagon says it is holding 520 men in Guantanamo, mainly detained in Afghanistan. Only four have been charged.

“To those who argue the detainees are bad people, I say that whether they are good or bad, the rule of law extends to them because they are human beings,” Hunt declared.

“The writ of international human rights law does not stop at the gates of Guantanamo Bay,” added the New Zealand lawyer.—Reuters