Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
I am just back from Tripoli, where – amidst raucous celebrations about the end of war and dictatorship – I was part of a team investigating the cases of two families kidnapped by CIA and MI6 and sent to Gaddafi’s torture chambers.
The story goes like this: in February 2004, Abdelhakim Belhaj, a long-time Gaddafi opponent, tried to board a plane for Britain with his pregnant wife. The couple were denied boarding and hauled to Bangkok, where the CIA tortured them at a blacksite and flew them to Tripoli. Just a couple of weeks later, Sami al-Saadi (pictured right), Abdelhakim’s ...
For the past two days, I have been attending a conference in Hong Kong, from where I am writing.
It feels like a break from work, to be honest, as normally when I am abroad the day is spent rushing from one meeting to the next, or desperately writing memos. And of course there still is that – our first night we met with the lawyer and family members of three British nationals in Thailand, still in prison over 3 years after their death sentence was overturned and they were acquitted. In fact, as I write this Harriet, on her first ...
Last Friday, I took part in an unusual meeting in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.
The meeting had been organized so that Pashtun tribal elders who lived along the Pakistani-Afghan frontier could meet with Westerners for the first time to offer their perspectives on the shadowy drone war being waged by the Central Intelligence Agency in their region. Twenty men came to air their views; some brought their young sons along to experience this rare interaction with Americans. In all, 60 villagers made the journey.
The meeting was organized as a traditional jirga. In Pashtun culture, a jirga acts as both ...
It is generally considered a very bad career move to cry at work. Which is, I suppose, why I rarely do it. But when I learned that Sheraz Shah had died of heart failure in Pakistani custody, I did cry. In front of all my colleagues.
Sheraz’s case is tragic. He died on December 31st 2010, now almost a year ago, after spending three years in custody awaiting trial for a capital crime he could not possibly have committed.
Sadly, it is quite normal for prisoners in Pakistan, and the semi-independent state of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (“AJK”, where ...
Five days after Manuel Valle’s execution, a letter addressed to Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski arrived at his office. Manuel had already been executed by lethal injection on 28 Sept 2011.
Sept. 23, 2011
Dear Archbishop Wenski,
I sincerely hope this letter finds you enjoying the very best of health, as well as God’s good graces. I am well, at peace, and prepared for whatever God’s will has in store for me within the next week.
The love and support of my family, as well as that of many friends and kind individuals whom I have never had ...
As a front-page article in Finland’s leading daily Helsingin Sanomat today explains, the Finnish government have reluctantly been compelled, in response to requests by Amnesty International, to release some data about suspicious planes passing through Finnish territory between 2001 and 2006. But does the government have the will to investigate the loose ends which this data has brought to light?
The mysterious flight of N733MA in March 2006 is a case in point. According to the data released by the Finnish foreign ministry, this plane flew from Porto in Portugal to Finland, arriving in Helsinki at 20:37 on ...
January 11, 2012 will mark the 10th anniversary of Guantánamo Bay Naval Base opening its doors as a detention centre. In those ten years, 779 men have been detained (and mistreated) in this island prison. As of today, 171 men remain and Guantánamo isn't showing signs of closing any time soon; in fact, there is construction all over the base.
It's true the conditions have improved vastly since the days of living in outside cages and the use of torture techniques designed to break US soldiers being held by Communist dictatorships has ended. However, a new ...
On Monday night a team from Reprieve went to see Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London.
In the play, Paulina Salas – played by the impossibly beautiful Thandie Newton – was brutally raped by a doctor who played Schubert’s string quartet Death and the Maiden while he tortured her. We watch events unfold in Salas’ home between Paulina, her human rights lawyer husband and a mysterious doctor who she believes is her tormentor.
Set in post-Pinochet Chile, Dorfman uses the play to expose the use of torture as a tool for…what, exactly ...
“The principle idea of Active Resistance is that you get out of life what you put in and that real experience of the world involves thinking. It is not enough to follow world politics, see films and read the prize-winning best sellers. This is superficial, you need to go deep in order to understand who you are, what the world is and how things could be better.” Vivienne Westwood
In November, a new book is being published to catalogue the 100 images collected as a result of this campaign. Starting on the 8th of September 2010, people were asked ...
"What was a science-fiction scenario not much more than a decade ago has become today’s news.”
This quote from Scott Shane’s thoughtful article on China’s recent unveiling of 25 new models of drone sums up the way modern warfare is about to change. That change is coming rapidly - so rapidly that discussions of the legal, moral and political implications surrounding these “robot wars” are going to have to run to catch up.
If China becomes the world’s fourth nation to use drone strikes against suspected enemies, we may have a new international norm on our hands ...
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