The United States was attacked for its human rights record on Friday as opponents including Cuba and Iran slammed its failure to close Guantanamo Bay and its decision to maintain military trials for terror suspects.
The Obama administration, which two years ago joined the U.N. Human Rights Council shunned by the Bush White House, was in the dock at the Geneva forum, whose 47 member completed an examination of the U.S. record begun last November.
Iran's delegation took the floor a day after the United States and other countries presented a draft resolution denouncing Tehran's record and calling for the re-establishment of a U.N. investigator on Iran for the first time in a decade. The text will be voted on next week and is expected to be adopted.
"The U.S. must close its secret prisons and Guantanamo Bay prison, stop human rights violations by its military forces abroad, bring to justice those responsible for war crimes and massacres against civilians as well as acts of torture carried out in U.S.-controlled prisons," Iran's envoy Seyed Mohammad Reza Sajjadi said.
Russia urged Washington to consider imposing a moratorium on the death penalty, while China called for it to investigate fully U.S. killings of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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This is the end. The final blood-soaked chapter of the genocide. It will be over soon....
