Since being elected, Barack Obama has been consistently quiet about his future foreign policy plans. One notable exception, however, came in a television interview soon after the election, when he pledged to follow through on a commitment made during the campaign to shut down the US terrorist detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The site, built after the 11 September 2001 attacks to house Al Qaeda militants, has long been a source of transatlantic tension. This is partly because some European politicians - especially in the European Parliament - were quick to join the chorus of human rights organisations that condemned the legal black hole and public relations disaster that Guantanamo has become. But it is also because Europe - whether unwittingly or not is debatable - actually helped to put some of the detainees there in the first place, through the CIA's renditions programme, which operated through Europe. 

So following Obama's pledge the question remains: what will happen to Guantanamo's remaining inmates, believed to number some two hundred and fifty? According to Benjamin Wittes, a legal expert at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, "the solutions may prove disquieting to some". Wittes says that "Europe could play a big role if it so chose in helping to resettle the large group of detainees who are cleared for release but cannot go to their home countries". These people cannot return home either because they risk being tortured there of because their government - most of which are in the Middle East or North Africa - is refusing to take them back. The issue, says Wittes, "is whether the Obama administration can leverage his enormous personal prestige to get European countries to play a more active role".

A first sign of Europe being willing to help came in December, when Portugal offered to resettle up to 60 inmates not considered a security risk from countries like Algeria and Tunisia, where they cannot be sent home as they risk being tortured. When Europoliticsasked Poland's Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, on a recent trip to Washington, if Europe should help, he was non-committal, bordering on hostile. "This is an internal US decision," he said. "My personal view is that using due process from the start, or even the provisions of the Geneva Convention for military tribunals, could have been done without paying the price in image." But Sikorski sidestepped the central question of what should be done with the detainees now. French Home Affairs Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, by contrast, seemed more amenable, telling Europolitics that the idea of Europe taking detainees "should be debated at the European level," while she added there were no French national detainees at Guantanamo presently. 

REOPENING OLD WOUNDS

There is precedent for Europe taking detainees. In 2006, Albania - one of the most pro-US countries in Europe due to Washington's unwavering support for Kosovo -  accepted several Chinese Uyghurs. But there will be many in Europe whose toes will curl at the mere thought of even raising the issue as it will bring back painful memories of the whole controversy surrounding alleged CIA abductions, detentions and transport of terror suspects to Guantanamo via Europe. EU member states Poland, Romania, Italy, Germany, Ireland and Sweden were all implicated in that controversy. Most of their governments either pleaded ignorance of what was going on or - in the case of claims of secret prisons in Poland and Romania - flatly denied the allegations. 

But as Brookings expert Wittes points out, it is in fact in both the US and Europe's interest to close Guantanamo: "It has done enormous damage - in part fairly, in part unfairly - to America's prestige. It is a punching bag for people who dislike America. And it disspirits those who would like to be our allies".

So what is the status of Guantanamo's inmates? There is a handful in the process of being tried through military commissions. However, it is nor sure that the Obama administration will be able to - or even want to - continue with this type of prosecution because there is a question mark hanging over the legality and fairness of the whole military tribunals system President Bush set up in 2006. Out of the approximately eight hundred prisoners who have passed through Guantanamo in its seven-year history, the US has successfully prosecuted a grand total of three. One was an Australian man, who pleaded guilty in return for being allowed to return to Australia. Two others were convicted and sentenced.

NO ONE WANTS THEM 

Sixty more detainees have already been cleared for release. In other words, the US does not plan to prosecute them and does not consider them a threat. The remainder fall into the rather unsettling category of being deemed too dangerous to be released and yet incapable of being prosecuted because there is not enough evidence that could be used against them to get a conviction in a criminal trial. As the outgoing US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, who helped create the Guantanamo system, noted in a recent interview: "What we have left is the hardcore [...] including high-value targets like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed". Cheney added: "I don't know very many congressmen who are eager to have two hundred Al Qaeda terrorists deposited in their district". He might have said the same thing about European governments.