USA: Law and executive disorder: President gives green light to secret detention program

Index Number: AMR 51/135/2007
Date Published: 17 August 2007
Categories: Americas, USA

On 20 July 2007, President George W. Bush issued an executive order determining that Article 3 common to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 "shall apply to a program of detention and interrogation operated by the Central Intelligence Agency" (CIA). This report provides some background to the development of the secret CIA program and to the issuing of this executive order more than five years later. It concludes that both the executive order and the CIA program itself fail to comply with the USA's international obligations.