Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
Last week, the Pakistan Police Torture Team officially moved in to our new Birmingham offices, set in the heart of the Jewellery Quarter (which certainly lives up to its name) in the city centre.
This will now be our base as we try to identify and take witness statements of those British Pakistanis that have suffered abuse at the hands of the police over in Pakistan.
Setting up the office marks the start of the project, and it has now been exponentially transformed from a dusty storage unit into a fully-fledged professional office. The excitement of a new office complete ...
Reprieve has challenged the appointment of Sir Peter Gibson as the Chair of the forthcoming inquiry into complicity in torture on the part of the intelligence services. I want to make the reasons for this very clear.
We are certainly not saying that Sir Peter is not an excellent and very senior judge. We do not want to launch any sort of personal attack on him. However, we do feel that, for a number of reasons, it is not appropriate for him to chair the inquiry.
When Prime Minister David Cameron launched the inquiry, he said that it was in ...
This is the text of Reprieve's letter to Sir Peter Gibson, asking him to reconsider his position. The fully referenced letter is attached below.
July 19, 2010
Rt. Hon. Sir Peter Gibson
The Intelligence Services Commissioner
c/o 2 Marsham Street
London SW1P 4DF
Re: Torture Inquiry - Recusal
Dear Sir Peter:
I am, naturally, very glad that there is to be an inquiry into the complicity of Britain in torture. However, if the inquiry is to achieve its stated goals – including ridding Britain of the stain that has blemished our reputation – it is essential that the procedure used is ...
I hope media and courtroom flurries this week have reminded readers of a man the US government would rather they forget: my Guantanamo client and Algerian refugee Ahmed Belbacha.
As reported by the Washington Post, Ahmed and five other Algerians in Guantánamo Bay are deadlocked in a fight to stay there. Peter Finn reports that, while the Obama Administration would send these men home tomorrow, the prisoners are terrified to go, and are willing to wait in Guantánamo until a safe home can be found.
The issue is being fought out in the Supreme Court as I write this. If ...
Reprieve's client Shabbir Zaib was acquitted in February after 17 months in a Pakistani prison.
In this interview with Scotland's Daily Record, he talks about how he came to be imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, and how it feels to be back home in Glasgow.
Shabbir, pictured here with Reprieve lawyer Marc Callcutt, has been helping with Reprieve's Pakistan Police Torture Project.
To commemorate the anniversary of Ruth Ellis's execution, I will be tweeting live at the Litweeter Festival – part of the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre – at 2.30 afternoon.
Today is the 55th anniversary of the death of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in Britain. Ruth’s case provoked widespread public outrage – over 50,000 people signed a petition for clemency – and is now considered a pivotal moment in the campaign for the abolition of the death penalty in the UK. In 1965 the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act suspended the death ...
On Thursday 8th July, Lord Faulkner asked the government in the House of Lords what representations had been made to US authorities about reprieving Linda Carty.
Baroness Neville-Jones, the Minister of State for Security, responded that the Lib-Con coalition was as staunchly opposed to the death penalty as its predecessor, and that the government is “committed to using all appropriate influence to prevent the execution of any British national”.
Lord Thomas of Gresford, a Liberal Democrat, then put three very interesting questions to the Minister:
“Is the Minister aware that Mexico and Germany took the United States to the International ...
Last week the Alabama Supreme Court set an execution date for Holly Wood, a man who was convicted of killing his former girlfriend Ruby Lois Gosha in 1993 and sentenced to death, despite the fact that he has an approximate IQ of 59 – the score for a person of normal intelligence is around 100.
In federal court, the judge threw out the death sentence on the basis that Wood’s lawyer had failed to tell jurors of his client’s serious mental impairment. The Alabama justice system is severely underfunded and only $1,000 was allotted to Wood's defence ...
If you do send one of the books listed below, please let us know (either leave a note on our facebook wall or send a quick mail to info@reprieve.org.uk) as we will take the title off the list. You are of course welcome to send off-list books too!
The catch is, the prison will not accept media sent from ...
Two of Reprieve’s toughest projects have turned a corner this week: our court battle over torture policy, and our call for a full public inquiry into allegations of complicity in torture by the British secret services.
On Monday, Reprieve’s ‘torture policy’ litigation forced the Coalition government to commit to creating new guidelines for British secret agents.
In our application for judicial review, we told the court why current secret guidelines may have allowed our secret services to be complicit in the torture of prisoners abroad. We asked the judge to review the official policy; regulating how MI5/MI6 ...
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