A home for detainees

Call it the coalition of the grudging: U.S. allies who praised President Obama for announcing the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility have resisted the resettlement of detainees on their soil. That’s supposed to change as the result of an agreement Monday between the United States and the European Union. But the joint statement doesn’t require any EU country to take even a single detainee.

Now, as before the statement, the extent of European cooperation depends on this country practicing what it preaches about the need to find places for at least 50 detainees (out of 240 remaining at Guantanamo) who can’t be sent to their home countries. Obama must overrule advisors who are telling him to capitulate to a cowardly Congress and abandon plans to settle (or imprison) some detainees in the United States.

The administration has been frustrated by Europe’s record so far. Germany balked at accepting 17 Uighurs, Muslim separatists from China who reasonably feared persecution if they were repatriated. Britain, which has a large Muslim population and has accepted six non-British detainees, seems to be balking at further transfers and objected when four Uighurs were moved to Bermuda, a British territory. Italy will accept three detainees. France has accepted one: Lakhdar Boumediene, an Algerian whose lawsuit prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to rule last year that prisoners at Guantanamo could petition for writs of habeas corpus.

Obviously EU countries aren’t the only possible destinations for freed detainees. Thirteen Uighurs will be settled, at least temporarily, on Palau, a Pacific island and former U.S. territory, and Albania has accepted eight non-citizen detainees (one of whom later moved to Sweden). But it is EU nations that for some time have assured the United States they would help, in the words of the joint U.S.-EU statement, “to assist with the reception of certain former Guantanamo detainees.”

Some may be more willing to cooperate because of principles contained in the statement, including an obligation by the United States to share information about detainees and contribute to the cost of their relocation. But the best incentive for European cooperation is a willingness by the United States to do its part. Obama seemed to make such a commitment in a speech last month in which he reminded nervous members of Congress that hundreds of convicted terrorists are already held in “supermax” prisons from which no one has escaped.

The president mustn’t waver from that position. As German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble put it: “If none of the U.S. states are ready to take in Guantanamo inmates, then you will have to explain to the European public why the rules for Europe should be different.”