MOSCOW, April 17 - RAPSI. The clashes in the controversial US military prison at Guantanamo Bay last week underline the need to close the facility, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s point man for human rights said on Wednesday.

“Clashes between Guantanamo inmates and guards are yet another illustration of the necessity to close this detention facility, where human rights are being violated,” the Russian Foreign Ministry's Special Representative for Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law, Konstantin Dolgov, said in a Twitter message.

Dolgov's sentiment echoes one frequently urged by US President Barrack Obama, who made the closure of Guantanamo Bay central to his presidential election campaign in 2008. Obama's first-ever executive order was aimed at closing the prison facility, but so far little has come of these initiatives due largely to the legal grey area surrounding the transfer of its detainees.

Russia has stepped up its criticism of the prison following the publication of its so-called “Guantanamo List.” The blacklist of US officials banned from entering Russia was published last Saturday in response to a similar US travel ban on Russian officials suspected of human rights violations, known as the Magnitsky List.

The US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) said on April 13 that a group of inmates, armed with “improvised weapons,” had clashed with guards who fired non-lethal rounds at them in response. The violence broke out when detainees attempted to limit the guards’ ability to observe them by covering surveillance cameras, windows and glass partitions.

The violence coincided with a hunger strike declared by at least 40 of the prison’s 166 detainees, in protest against poor conditions.

SOUTHCOM announced that in response to the ongoing hunger strike, the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, which is charged with the safe, legal, and humane care and custody of detainees in the facility, ordered the detainees from communal to single-cell living arrangements.