A United States-based human rights group has charged the Bush administration with continuing to 'ignore' international law in its treatment of detainees, especially children, at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
In a report released in New York on Friday, the Human Rights Watch said three children, aged 13 to 15, have been held for about a year.
The military is also detaining an undisclosed number of children aged 16 and 17 at an 'adult camp, rather than separately, as required by international standards,' it said.
The report said since January 11, 2002, the US government has sent over 700 people, picked up from around the world, to Guantanamo.
Some 660 people are in detention.
As the detention camp begins its third year, it said, the public still does not know who the detainees are, what they have allegedly done, and whether and when they will be charged with crimes or released.
There have been no hearings to determine their legal status and no judicial review-in short, no legal process.
The Bush administration, it claimed, asserts all its detainees at Guantanamo are enemy combatants in the war against terrorism and therefore properly detained until terrorism is vanquished.
Top administration officials have repeatedly characterized the detainees as the 'worst of the worst.'
President George W Bush has called the detainees 'bad people' and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has labeled them 'hardcore, well-trained terrorists.'
'Yet these blanket characterizations stand in sharp contrast to what is known about at least some detainees,' it added.
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