Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
As the clock ticks down on the Yunus Rahmatullah case, the Ministry of Defence has been caught in another mess over its special forces in Iraq. The two cases have regrettable parallels: in both instances the MoD set its face against coming clean about the fate of its prisoners. Now it has been forced to admit the existence of the H1 blacksite, and is still stonewalling over the fate of Yunus Rahmatullah. But the time is fast approaching when the truth - all of it, however ugly - will emerge.
A brief recap: last week we learned that British involvement in Iraq ...
Every so often, when an advocate of increasing drone strikes pops up in the media, it can be worth taking just the briefest of looks into their background.
Take General Jack M Keane (Rtd), who has called for the CIA drone programme in Pakistan to be further expanded.
Given that the programme already apparently regards any “men carrying weapons” in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of the country as “legitimate targets,” and has resulted in the deaths of countless hundreds of civilians, it is hard to see exactly how it could become any less discriminating. But that is not the ...
I have just arrived in Guantánamo, on my first attorney-client visit for a year.
On one level it's easier to converse with prisoners these days - we have held them so long that many speak American English - but on another, we lawyers have been reduced to little more than glorified pizza-deliverymen to the forgotten and inconvenient. What can I tell these men?
The camp has changed a lot since I first touched down in 2007. A Saab executive plane flies in lieu of the leaky propellor job (whose airline folded). The visitors' lodge (pictured right), once a $14-a-night summer ...
Instead of threatening a new system of secret courts, the British government must respond to the unprecedented wrongdoing of the 'War on Terror' years by keeping the legal system open and transparent.
Just a few weeks into 2012, we have already been presented with a series of stark reminders of just how far the British government is from its stated aim of "get[ting] to the bottom" of UK complicity in the torture and rendition of detainees during the War on Terror.
January has so far seen the opening of two new police investigations into UK involvement in the rendition ...
It’s ten years since the first detainees arrived at Guantánamo Bay. To give some sort of perspective, that’s almost as long as the ipod and the Euro have been around. In the same way, it’s become hard to imagine a world without Guantánamo, to the extent that it has entered our language as a by-word for unending imprisonment beyond the rule of law – the 21st century synonym for ‘gulag’.
Yet, almost paradoxically, the camp’s notoriety has not been matched by either the political will or the public pressure needed to close it. President Obama ...
After finally being moved to Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, following out-of-control riots in Kisangani, Joshua French and his friend, Tjostolv ‘Mike’ Moland, have written a report to share and highlight the horrors of their first weeks in the new location.
As I read through the report, the picture Joshua paints becomes more and more vivid. So many things he says demonstrates the flaws in the DRC’s justice system, from rough and humiliating physical treatment by the guards to constant loud noise, preventing even a couple of hours sleep. However, a few sentences and stories stand out ...
The Chinese government never wanted anyone to know about Akmal Shaikh. They wanted him to remain one of the nameless thousands executed each year for crimes ranging from corruption to destroying cultural artefacts.
Instead his execution on 29 December, 2009 was covered by almost every newspaper between London and Beijing. Instead the world's attention turned to one of China's most abhorrent and hidden human rights abuses.
Akmal, a British citizen, was arrested in September 2007 at Urumqi Airport in China. He was convicted of drug smuggling under article 347 of China's Criminal Code. His trial took place ...
Last month a Superior Court judge ruled California’s revised lethal injection protocol to be invalid on the grounds that the state failed to adequately consider switching to use of a single drug.
Instead it has opted to retain its triple-drug cocktail that in 2006 was declared unconstitutional in light of evidence that executions inflict excessive pain on the condemned.
California stands at a crossroads: it can appeal the ruling and ignore the growing catalogue of botched executions as well as expert medical testimony that sodium thiopental frequently fails to induce unconsciousness, thereby inflicting the horror of slow suffocation. Or ...
Over the past few days I have spent a lot of time waiting to go to hearings in district courts in Indonesia, where death sentences are still regularly handed out. Outside the cell where the prisoners were waiting for their hearings, tiny little children and their mothers wait patiently in the heat, eyeing the bars anxiously. Their vigil reminded me of the mothers, fathers, families and friends we met in Reprieve’s work and in particular, of Kari Hilde, Joshua French’s mother.
In 2010 Joshua French and his friend, Tjostolv ‘Mike’ Moland were sentenced to death for the third ...
What is your most terrible nightmare? Is it worse than being trapped in a distant black hole, in an unknown country, unable to contact your family?
Is it more terrifying than torture, by day and by night, when your family does not even know whether you are dead or alive? Is your greatest fear, then, worse than Yunus Rahmatullah's reality?
The law does not concern itself with trifles, and if you ever find yourself held beyond the reach of basic decency, you will be glad that the arm of the law is long. On Wednesday the rule of law ...
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