WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The US standards for punishing criminals raise serious concerns as they fail to meet international norms, US advocacy group The Sentencing Project Research Analyst Nazgol Ghandnoosh told Sputnik.
“The United States is out of step with international norms for punishment and is being challenged to develop methods of punishment that preserve the humanity of all individuals, even convicted terrorists,” Ghandnoosh said on Friday.
“The Irish High Court's refusal to extradite terrorism suspect Ali Charaf Damache to the United States is comparable to the European Union's export ban on lethal-injection drugs to the United States,” Ghandnoosh added.
The Irish court feared the suspected terrorist would be sent to a solitary confinement cell at the notorious ADX prison in Florence, Colorado.
“At supermax prisons like ADX, prisoners are subject to extreme isolation for years, and sometimes indefinitely,” Ghandnoosh explained.
The UN Human Rights Council declared in 2011 solitary confinement for more than 15 days to be “unjustifiable” under any circumstance, he reminded.
