Former President George W. Bush laughs while answering questions about his presidency at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, November 18, 2010. 
 
 GENEVA Former President George W. Bush has canceled a visit to Switzerland, where he was to address a Jewish charity gala, due to the risk of legal action against him for alleged torture, rights groups said on Saturday. 
 
 Bush was to be the keynote speaker at Keren Hayesod's annual dinner on February 12 in Geneva. But pressure has been building on the Swiss government to arrest him and open a criminal investigation if he enters the Alpine country. 
 
 Criminal complaints against Bush alleging torture have been lodged in Geneva, court officials say. 
 
 Human rights groups said they had intended to submit a 2,500-page case against Bush in the Swiss city on Monday for alleged mistreatment of suspected militants at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. naval base in Cuba where captives from Afghanistan, Iraq and other fronts in the so-called War on Terror were interned. 
 
 Leftist groups had also called for a protest on the day of his visit next Saturday, leading Keren Hayesod's organizers to announce that they were cancelling Bush's participation on security grounds -- not because of the criminal complaints. 
 
 But groups including the New York-based Human Rights Watch and International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) said the cancellation was linked to growing moves to hold Bush accountable for torture, including waterboarding. He has admitted in his memoirs and television interviews to ordering use of the interrogation technique that simulates drowning. 
 
 "He's avoiding the handcuffs," Reed Brody, counsel for Human Rights Watch, told Reuters. 
 
 The action in Switzerland showed Bush had reason to fear legal complaints against him if he travelled to countries that have ratified an international treaty banning torture, he said. 
 
 Brody is an American-trained lawyer specialized in pursuing war crimes worldwide, especially those allegedly ordered by former leaders, including Chile's late dictator Augusto Pinochet and Chad's ousted president Hissene Habre. Habre has been charged by Belgium with crimes against humanity and torture, and is currently exiled in Senegal. 
 
 PROSECUTE OR EXTRADITE 
 
 "President Bush has admitted he ordered waterboarding which everyone considers to be a form of torture under international law. Under the Convention against Torture, authorities would have been obliged to open an investigation and either prosecute or extradite George Bush," Brody said. 
 
 Swiss judicial officials have said that Bush would still enjoy a certain diplomatic immunity as a former head of state. 
 
 Dominique Baettig, a member of the Swiss parliament from the right-wing People's Party, wrote to the Swiss federal government last week calling for the arrest of Bush for alleged war crimes if he came to the neutral country. 
 
 Bush, in his "Decision Points" memoirs on his 2001-2009 presidency, strongly defends the use of waterboarding as key to preventing a repeat of the September 11 attacks on the United States. 
 
 Most human rights experts consider the practice a form of torture, banned by the Convention on Torture, an international pact prohibiting torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment. Switzerland and the United States are among 147 countries to have ratified the 1987 treaty. 
 
 "Whatever Bush or his hosts say, we have no doubt he canceled his trip to avoid our case. The message from civil society is clear - If you're a torturer, be careful in your travel plans. It's a slow process for accountability, but we keep going," the Paris-based FIDH and New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights said in a joint statement on Saturday. 
 
 Sami El Hadjj, a former Al Jazeera journalist and former detainee at Guantanamo, had been due to speak at their news conference in Geneva on Monday, where they will release the 2,500-page complaint. 
 
 "I'm surprised he (Bush) would even consider visiting a country that has ratified the torture convention and which takes its responsibilities seriously," said Brody. 
 
 "I think George Bush's world is a very small place at the moment," he said. "He may enjoy some kind of impunity in the United States, but other countries will not treat him so indulgently." 
 
 (Editing by Mark Heinrich) ||||| President George W. Bush has canceled an event in the famously neutral country Switzerland because of expected protests to his presence there. 
 
 Bush was supposed to give the keynote address at a Jewish group's charity gala on Feb. 12 in Geneva. 
 
 Leftist groups had planned to protest the visit, according to news agencies. But several human rights groups had also filed criminal complaints against Bush, demanding that he be taken into custody if he stepped on Swiss soil and investigated for allegations of ordering torture. 
 
 A right-wing member of the Swiss parliament also demanded last week Bush's arrest on war crimes allegations if he came to the country, according to Reuters. 
 
 
 
 Swiss officials countered that, as a former head of state, Bush would be protected with a level of diplomatic immunity, and Keren Hayesod, the group that had invited Bush, said the court actions against the former president did not play into the decision to go forward with the dinner without him. 
 
 "We didn't want to put people and property in Geneva at risk. The gala is maintained but George Bush will not take part," the group's lawyer, Robert Equey told the Tribune de Geneve. "The (criminal) complaints did not weigh in the decision." 
 
 He noted protests against the G8 summit just across the border in France in 2003 that ended up rampaging through Geneva.
– A visit by George W. Bush to Switzerland later this month has been called off because the host charity says it feared leftist protests would get out of hand. Human rights groups, meanwhile, say the real reason is because they planned to lodge a criminal complaint against Bush accusing him of sanctioning torture, reports Reuters. Bush had been scheduled to speak to a Jewish group Feb. 12 in Geneva, and an attorney for the group says the potential legal action played no role in the decision to cancel, notes the Hill. "We didn't want to put people and property in Geneva at risk," he said, citing plans by protesters to arrive en masse. A spokesman for Human Rights Watch had a different take: "He's avoiding the handcuffs." Noting that Bush acknowledged in his memoir that he approved waterboarding, "authorities would have been obliged to open an investigation and either prosecute or extradite" him, said the spokesman.