Just keeping our options open: U.S. declines to sign treaty banning secret detentions

The Washington Post reports:

Representatives from 57 countries on Tuesday signed a long-negotiated treaty prohibiting governments from holding people in secret detention. The United States declined to endorse the document, saying its text did not meet U.S. expectations.

Louise Arbour, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said the treaty was "a message to all modern-day authorities committed to the fight against terrorism" that some practices are "not acceptable."

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack declined to comment, except to say that the United States helped draft the treaty but that the final wording "did not meet our expectations."

The Associated Press reported that McCormack declined to comment on whether the U.S. stance was influenced by the Bush administration's policy of sending terrorism suspects to CIA-run prisons overseas, which President Bush acknowledged in September.

"Our American friends were naturally invited to this ceremony," French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said after the signing here. "Unfortunately, they weren't able to join us. That won't prevent them from one day signing on in New York at U.N. headquarters, and I hope they will."

Some U.S. allies in Europe also declined to join, among them Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy.

The convention defines forced disappearance as the arrest, detention or kidnapping of a person by state agents or affiliates and subsequent denials about the detention or location of the individual.

The treaty, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in December, has been pushed for nearly a quarter-century by rights groups and the families of individuals who have disappeared at the hands of various governments. It also addresses the international debate over the rights of terrorism suspects.

Here is the text of the International Convention against Enforced Disappearance.