If I might just add, one of the challenges is created by the way the Iraqi government is handling this. The residents are denied all visitors. There are no people who can visit them except for a rare U.S. government official and a rare UN official. They're able to communicate by telephone, via Skype, but basically that's about it. There are only a small number of Internet connections there.
To me, it's outrageous what's going on in Camp Liberty. It's outrageous. Whoever in world has heard of someone having to pay for their own imprisonment? This is what these people are doing. They're paying millions of dollars a year, funded by the NCRI, to actually pay for all the fuel, to pay and cater food to be brought to them, and otherwise.
I've never heard of such a thing. Even in the worst prisons in the world, you'll get scraps of food that aren't very good and you're not going to be in great condition, but you don't have to buy your own food. Maybe there are a few exceptions to that, but to me, it's outrageous what's going on.
The other thing is that the international community....This issue, as was noted before by your colleague, has been so politicized that when I met recently with UNHCR in Geneva, they tried to argue that the people in Camp Liberty were not actually detained. That was their argument. They said they were in a temporary transit location. I drew a picture on a page. It's a square. Can they leave? Can they leave whenever they want? No.
The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has said that they're detained in violation of international law. This is a body of the Human Rights Council. Will we disagree with that assessment? I'm like, “Well, if this isn't a prison, then what is a prison?” It has four walls. It has guards on all the towers, and people cannot come and go as they see fit. That is the classic definition of arbitrary detention under international law.
They've been given no due process of law. They've been charged with no crime. There's been no indictment. There's been no presentation to a court, to a judge. No ability to have a defence counsel challenge the claimed offences that they may have committed. None of that.
Yet even UNHCR itself says that they're not detained. So if you're in a situation where you have UNHCR, which is supposed to be a humanitarian body, not a political body, for political reasons rendering judgments like that, getting attention to the issues becomes all the more challenging because when people hear UNHCR's reports on Capitol Hill or in other parliaments—when I talk to people—they come across as reasonable, and people are used to being able to rely on UNHCR for good information.
It is a major challenge, not only to get attention to this kind of suffering, given the world that we live in, but also because unfortunately there is some complicity in the international community and UN agencies in turning a blind eye and/or lying about what's actually going on.