UN Informs Cuba that Detention of Alan Gross Violates International Law
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Alan Gross Cuban Foreign Ministry International Law Cuba Jared Genser Jewish-American contractor Josefina Vidal
Alan Gross with his wife Judy. Photo: Gross family.
Josefina Vidal, head of North American Affairs at the Cuban Foreign Ministry, said in a press conference Wednesday that the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has informed Cuba that the country’s ongoing detention of Jewish-American contractor Alan Gross violates international law, the Associated Press reported.
Dec. 3 marked the three-year anniversary of Gross’s arrest. He was sentenced to a 15-year prison term for helping Cuba’s Jewish community access the Internet.
The contents of the UN arbitrary detention group’s ruling in favor of Gross, despite Vidal’s admission of defeat, have not yet been publicly released by Cuba. Gross’s attorney, Jared Genser, in a press release called for Cuba to reveal the full UN judgment “so that the international community can see what the United Nations has itself said.”
Comprised of neutral experts from Chile, Norway, Pakistan, Senegal, and Ukraine, the UN working group issues opinions that are not binding or enforceable, but could still be significant, Genser told JNS.org in October.
“Having an independent and impartial group in the United Nations saying that he’s been held in violation of international law provides a very strong political and public relations tool to put pressure on the government of Cuba to resolve the case,” Genser said.
4:36 pm
Help Alan Gross and add your name to the petition on WhiteHouse.org to arrange an exchange of prisoners with Cuba:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/open-honest-dialog-cuba-government-secure-release-american-operative-alan-gross/qcZC2pG2
11:26 pm
Cuba is a Stalinist state in which dozens of concentration camps cries cross the country..since 1959 it has tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of its own people…It could care less about the UN, human rights or anything else…Torture and murder are the basis of Cuban rule since 1959…Only liberals with their delusional belief system think otherwise.
4:33 pm
It is not within the mandate of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions to evaluate or judge the national legislation of a sovereign State or make any statement on the independence and impartiality of the courts, except for those aspects related to non-compliance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the appropriate international instruments accepted by the affected States, which Cuba has strictly complied with.
The Working Group made a hasty analysis of this item on November 23, outside the scheduled agenda, without the translation of the Cuban response and based on an alleged “executive summary” drafted by some person. The deliberation by the experts took two hours.
We know of the pressures exerted by the United States on the Group to force out an opinion that would exactly coincide with the actions that have been planned to mark the anniversary of Mr. Gross’ detention.
9:41 pm
An American Jew imprisoned illegally in Cuba? Did Obama offer to lock him up in Gitmo or is he just laughing?