Austria may accept 50 prisoners released from the United States' Guantanamo Bay prison, Emilou MacLean, attorney from the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) said here Wednesday.
According to the Austrian Press Agency (APA), MacLean said these 50 prisoners are from the Middle East and Asian countries like Uzbekistan, Syria, Algeria and Palestine.
MacLean said she is visiting European countries to lobby with them to accept the prisoners, but she declined to name which countries she would visit except for Germany and Switzerland.
She also said certain European countries have already expressed their willingness to accept the prisoners, but so far none of them has published an official statement on this. Therefore, she is looking for "a country that plays an exemplary role."
APA reported that MacLean had already contacted officials of the Austrian Foreign Ministry and Austrian Federal Chancellery on this matter. But both Austrian government bodies said it was only a "routine conversation" to convey "primary information."
After the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. troops detained terror suspects in the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. According to MacLean, there are now 255 prisoners at Guantanamo, of whom only about 20 have been prosecuted.
The legitimacy of the Guantanamo detention camp has been dispute for a long time.
MacLean told reporters that the United States has sent requests to "more than 100 countries" in the hope that they could accept the prisoners.
However, so far only Albania has accepted eight prisoners with non-Albanian nationality.
Source:Xinhua
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