Navi Pillay, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, has called on the US and Iraq to investigate allegations of detainee abuse revealed by WikiLeaks.
The whistle-blower WikiLeaks website released nearly 400,000 American military documents on Friday. Many of these documents included reports of serious abuse by Iraqi forces and also showed that US troops did not intervene to stop the violence in many cases.
Pillay said on Tuesday that the information adds to "concerns that serious breaches of international human rights law have occurred in Iraq."
He urged US and Iraq to prosecute all those responsible for the torture and unlawful killings.
Some of the documents released on Friday contain accounts of Iraqi forces abusing Iraqi prisoners and the US military not investigating those instances.
The documents also show that US forces handed over detainees to Iraqi forces despite signs of abuse.
They also show that US interrogators continued to question Iraqi detainees while some of them were still recovering from injuries inflicted upon them during their detention by Iraqi security officials. And in some cases, their wounds were clearly visible to the US interrogators.
PHOTO CAPTION
Founder of the Wikileaks website Julian Assange speaks to the media on October 23 during a press conference at the Park Plaza hotel in central London.
Al-Jazeera