Contact: Sharon Singh, [email protected], 202-675-8579, @AIUSAmedia
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) – Zeke Johnson, director of Amnesty International USA's Security with Human Rights campaign, issued the following statement in advance of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's appearance in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary committee scheduled for Wednesday, March 6:
"Senators have a great opportunity on Wednesday to ask Attorney General Holder tough questions about the administration's legal rationale for drone killings and embrace of indefinite detention at Guantanamo. Doing so would be a concrete step toward ensuring no person — U.S. citizen or anyone else — is unlawfully killed or illegally detained.
"The bottom line is that the Obama administration's policies on 'targeted killing' and indefinite detention rest on the fundamentally flawed "global war" legal theory that ignores human rights law and does not comply with the international legal definition of armed conflict.
"It is incumbent on Mr. Holder to fully answer why and how U.S. authorities will remedy this problem, not in sound bites or generalities, but in concrete ways that change the United States' course on human rights."
For a list of the top five questions that Attorney General Holder must answer, please visit Zeke Johnson's latest blog or go to www.amnestyusa.org.
Amnesty International is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning grassroots activist organization with more than 3 million supporters, activists and volunteers in more than 150 countries campaigning for human rights worldwide. The organization investigates and exposes abuses, educates and mobilizes the public, and works to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied.