For the first time, the United States is granting some 600 prisoners held in the U.S. air base in Bagram the right to challenge their detention in the jail dubbed the Afghan Guantanamo, officials said Monday.
Some of the men, many of whom have languished for years in the Bagram prison, will now be aided by a U.S. military official to gather witnesses and evidence in their cases, the Pentagon said.
They will then be allowed to defend themselves, and even call witnesses before a military body entrusted with reviewing the cases against them.
"It's basically a review procedure that ensures people go in front of a panel periodically to give them the opportunity to contest their detention," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters.
The inmates would be aided by a uniformed "personal representative" who would "guide them through this administrative process, to help gather witness statements," Whitman added.
"It's something that we had used in Iraq to help us manage the detainee population and ultimately reduce the detainee population by ensuring that we are only holding those that are the most dangerous threats."
The Bagram prison, located at an air base north of Kabul, has been used since 2002 as a holding site for terrorism suspects captured outside Afghanistan and Iraq.
But unlike the prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, the inmates have had no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as "enemy combatants".
U.S. President Barack Obama has mandated a review of overall detainee policy as part of his order to close the prison at the American naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba by January.
But in July, hundreds of prisoners led protests in Bagram fearing that they would be held indefinitely.
They refused to take part in video-telephone conversations, or to accept visits by their relatives set out under an International Red Cross program.
The news that they are now to be accorded certain, limited rights comes at a symbolic moment, with the U.S. administration given until midnight Monday to appeal an April court ruling.
That ruling said that an undetermined number of detainees in Bagram, who were captured outside of Afghanistan, should be given the right to challenge their detentions in American courts.
The Obama administration had said it intended to appeal the ruling.
Rights groups cautiously welcomed Monday's decision to grant the inmates the right to contest their detentions.
"We're pleased that an additional review has now been set up because detainees of Bagram are detained for a long time without charges and any kind of review process," Stacy Sullivan, from Human Rights Watch, told the news agency AFP.
"However, we have some concerns about whether this review process would be efficient because in Guantanamo Bay, the military set up a very similar review and it was basically used as a means to keep men in indefinite detention."
Amnesty International spokesman Geneve Mantri said Bagram had long posed a headache for US administrations.
"It's been a problem for a long time because they really aren't sure exactly who they have there," he said.
Last month, the ACLU protested against a refusal by the Pentagon and the CIA to supply the names, nationalities, place of arrests and details of those held in Bagram.
"None of the human rights group have ever had any access, even Afghan human rights groups were not allowed access," said Mantri.
Last month, a top U.S. general called for as many as 400 of the 600 inmates to be released, saying they posed no threat to the United States.
There was little evidence against hundreds of detainees to justify their continued imprisonment, according to findings by Major General Douglas Stone, National Public Radio (NPR) reported, citing unnamed military officials.
In his report to Central Command, which oversees the region, Stone recommended that the U.S. military abandon its detention program in Afghanistan within 12 to 18 months, NPR said.