Despite President Obama’s 2008 campaign promise to close down the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, it is still open, and conditions have deteriorated so much that prisoners are engaging in a hunger strike. While the Obama administration contends that 41 prisoners are participating, the detainees’ lawyers report that the number is closer to 130 of the 166 prisoners.

The strikes began in February after prison guards began searching detainees’ Qurans for weapons. But with only nine out of the current 166 prisoners having been charged or convicted of a crime, the detainees shifted the purpose of the strike to protest their indefinite detention.

In 2005, when over 500 prisoners were being detained, a hunger strike was held to protest these same violations of international law, leading to the Detainee Treatment Act — a document with nonspecific provisions that remains loosely interpreted and unenforced.

The U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, asserted that the indefinite detention of the detainees “is in clear breach … of international law” and “severely undermines the United States’ stance” as “an upholder of human rights.” The majority of prisoners at Guantánamo are held in solitary confinement, and grotesque violence and degradation are reportedly common. Guards have beaten prisoners without provocation, cut them and urinated on them.

Some of Obama’s defenders blame the lack of progress in closing Guantánamo on a partisan Congress. However, the president has the ability to either close Guantánamo through an executive order or to transfer prisoners with a national security waiver.

With these powers at his disposal, Obama’s deliberate choice not to exercise them clearly indicates that he wants to keep the prison open. This marks one of the most drastic and disappointing differences between Obama as president and Obama as a senator.

The 2005 hunger strike of more than 200 detainees in Guantánamo Bay led to an act that prohibited the “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” of any prisoner. The only humane response to the hunger strike is not more laws the U.S. government can trample over, but the shutdown of Guantánamo Bay once and for all.

A version of this article appeared in the Monday, April 8 print edition. Email the WSN Editorial Board at [email protected].