This report returns to the detention facility at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay as detentions there enter their 20th year and as a new President prepares to enter the White House and become its fourth incumbent during the lifetime of this prison. But even as administration policy changed from ‘locate a detention facility and fill it’, to ‘review the detentions and close the prison’, to ‘keep it open and prepare it to receive more detainees’, the ghost at the table has been international human rights law – ignored under a ‘law of war’ framework defended by each administration of the past 19 years.
