UN-Truth

The AP reported today that “U.S. authorities have said a U.N. Security Council mandate allows them to retain custody of a detainee they believe is a security risk even if an Iraqi judicial body has ordered that prisoner freed. The U.N. mandate is due to expire this year” …

This report concerned Bilal Hussein, who the AP explained “was one of three journalists who were stopped at gunpoint by insurgents and taken to see the propped-up body. None of the journalists witnessed his death, said Santiago Lyon, AP’s director of photography. Hussein has been held by the U.S. military since he was detained on April 12, 2006, in Ramadi, about 70 miles west of Baghdad. Throughout his incarceration, he has maintained he is innocent and was only doing the work of a professional news photographer in a war zone. Hussein was a member of an AP team that won a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 2005, and his detention has drawn protests from rights groups and press freedom advocates. After the amnesty committee decision, AP President Tom Curley renewed the news organization’s call for the military to ‘do the right thing by ending its detention of a journalist who did nothing more than his job’ … New York-based Human Rights Watch also appealed for Hussein’s release. ‘The U.S. military held Bilal Hussein for nearly two years without charging, then transferred him to the Iraqi justice system, which apparently sees no reason to detain him’, Joe Stork, the group’s Middle East director, said in a statement Thursday. ‘It’s time to set him free’.” This AP report is posted here .

Filed under: Iraq, Journalism and Journalists, UN Security Council