U.N. refugee agency seeking information on 2 detainees

[struggle4progress]

Posted on Mon, Jan. 29, 2007
By Carol Rosenberg
McClatchy Newspapers

MIAMI - The United Nations refugee agency has discovered two internationally recognized refugees among the detainee population at Guantanamo - and has for weeks been seeking information from the Bush administration ...

But the disclosure by the U.N. High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) is the first known report of technically stateless people - a man born in Algeria and another in Somalia, who acquired official refugee status in Pakistan in the 1990s.

``We have had no access to them,'' said William Spindler, spokesman for the UNHCR, from its Geneva headquarters.

The refugee agency established the men's identities and status late last year - nearly five years after the prison camps were opened - and wrote the Pentagon on Dec. 20 ...

http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/news/nation/16575242.htm