As reported by the Irish Times and Andy Worthington, one of two Uzbeks released from Guantanamo to settle in Ireland over the weekend had been a juvenile taxi driver in Afghanistan at the time he was detained. Worthington provides us with the story of the juvenile, Shakhrukh Hamiduva:

All that is known publicly of Shakhrukh Hamiduva is that he was born in Kokand, Uzbekistan in December 1983 (and that he was, therefore, probably under 18 years of age at the time of his capture), that he was one of the first prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo in January 2002, and that he gave the following account in December 2004 to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal…

/snip/

In his tribunal, Hamiduva explained that he left Uzbekistan because of religious persecution, and added that his father and five uncles had been jailed, and that another uncle had been killed. Nevertheless, he had to contend with a number of allegations whose provenance was not disclosed, but which were almost certainly produced as a result of the interrogations of other prisoners (or of Hamiduva himself), in circumstances that may well have involved coercion or bribery. One allegation was that he had spent a year and a half in a training camp run by the Islamic Movement of Tajikistan, but he explained that he had spent that time at a refugee camp, which contained around 300 refugees.

/snip/

In a statement provided to his Personal Representative (a military officer assigned to the prisoners for the tribunals instead of a lawyer), he explained that he had initially wanted to go to Turkey, but that he couldn’t get a passport because he was too young, so he decided to work with the Tajik authorities at the refugee camp instead. This, he said, involved helping the refugees, and he added that the Tajik government then provided transportation to take him and other refugees to Afghanistan (actually deporting them, as they did with hundreds of Uzbek refugees in 1999, including Oybek Jabbarov and his family), where he helped some of them “to fix up things like cars or roofs” at a place in Kabul. He also explained that, after five or six months, he hooked up with an Afghan “mentor,” who owned a garage and taught him to drive, and added that, after working for him for a while, he bought a car and started to work as a taxi driver, which was his occupation when he was captured.

Hamiduva was captured while returning to Afghanistan from Pakistan, where he had gone seeking a passport for a return to Uzbekistan. He had a carload of Afghanis from Mazar-e-Sharif, whom he was carrying in return for directions for the trip. The car was stopped by Afghan forces, the passengers were allowed to leave and Hamiduva was turned over to a leader whom Worthington suspects was Rashid Dostum.

After being detained for over a month in Afghanistan (and being told by US personnel that they would assist him in getting home) Hamiduva was shipped to Guantanamo, where he appears to have been among the first prisoners shipped there.

Sadly, even though he was under 18 at the time he was captured, he reported that he was tortured. Quoting Worthington’s piece again:

He added, “I just want to let you know that they torture me a lot here at the camp. They would not let me sleep through the night; they were tak[ing] me to interrogations. I saw them beating other detainees, breaking their arms and legs.”

At least Hamiduva did not suffer the same fate as Dilawar, a fellow taxi driver who was tortured to death at Bagram and became the subject of the Oscar-winning film Taxi to the Dark Side.

Hamiduva’s case is far from unique. As Worthington also reported previously, there were at least 22 Guantanamo detainees who were juveniles at the time of their capture. As Worthington reported, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has specific requirements in such cases:

This imprecision seems to reflect the Pentagon’s lack of concern for whether prisoners were juvenile at the time of capture. Under the terms of Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (on the involvement of children in armed conflict), the U.S. administration is required to promote “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict,” but in May 2003, when the story first broke that juvenile prisoners were being held at Guantánamo, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a press conference, “This constant refrain of ‘the juveniles,’ as though there’s a hundred children in there — these are not children.”

It seems Ireland has a much better sense of justice than the United States. From the Irish Times article linked above:

Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern has requested that their privacy be respected. “The resettlement of the two individuals is a humanitarian gesture. They should be allowed time and space to rebuild their lives,” he said. “Ireland is a welcoming country and we are pleased to play our part with President Obama in assisting in the closing of this centre.”

Welcoming the development, Amnesty International said it hoped other countries would follow suit. “Today the Irish Government has brought us one step closer to shutting down Guantánamo Bay,” said Amnesty’s Ireland programmes director Noeleen Hartigan.

“Amnesty International strongly welcomes the announcement that two former detainees will be allowed to stay in Ireland and we hope that other countries, particularly in the EU, will follow our Government’s courageous example,” she added. “We would like to commend the political leadership shown in making this possible by Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern and Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin.”

Along with the stories of the disappearances of the children of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and Aafia Siddiqui, the treatment of juvenile prisoners at Guantanamo forces the conclusion that the US has no respect for the rights of children if they are sold as war prisoners or are the children of suspected terrorists. When will the US return to recognizing children’s rights?