US legal adviser claims European countries are reluctant to detain prisoners due to human rights laws British forces are avoiding detaining suspected insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq because of fears they will be liable under the European human rights convention, a key Bush administration lawyer told the Guardian yesterday. John Bellinger, legal adviser to secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, said detention operations had been "enormously complicated" by the application of human rights protection to war zones outside Europe. "Human rights law was arguably intended to apply to civilian populations," he said. "There has been an effort to extend it to military operations that are becoming more like counter-insurgency operations." He also said the US wanted to try Binyam Mohamed, a British resident held at Guantánamo Bay, for...
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