Principles vs. Interests: Uighur Detainees at Gitmo

A couple of weeks ago I attended a seminar discussing our value on justice with speakers Emily Berman and Michael Sternhell. This event invoked important relations between principle and interest. Many of us have argued that the Guantanamo detention camp is against human rights and we should have closed it down. However, another issue emerged. What are we going to do with the detainees? Among all the detainees, there is a special group call the Uighur. They fled away from western China to bordering state such as Afghanistan due to political persecution. Unfortunately, they were treated as suspects by the local people and handed over to the US government. They ended up in the detention camp at Gitmo. Although it was later determined that they actually posed no threat to the US, many of us including some Congressmen actually don’t agree to transfer those detainees to the US for trail and suggest we should just transfer them to other countries. So are we hypocrite? On one hand, we say we value certain principles such as human rights. On the other hand, we don’t want to risk our interest. How could we reconcile the conflict between these two? It is something that we should take a moment to think about.

Comments

[Nhu Truong]

Just joined TypePad for Politics of Development. Glad that you blogged about the case here.