Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
Reprieve's Fellow in Pakistan Sultana Noon reports on her last attempt to attend a hearing for Naheem Hussain and Rehan Zaman, who have been in prison for 5 years without trial.
Naheem and Rehan have always expressed frustration about the judicial process in Pakistan and how painfully slow it is – I went to their last hearing on July 9th 2009 and here is my account of the how the day proceeded. It was just one day for me, but for them it happens every time.
I arrived at the Mirpur District Court at about 10:15am for a hearing ...
We are very excited – according to the Times List, our Chair Lord Bingham and our Director Clive Stafford Smith are numbers 4 and 6 respectively on the list of the top 100 most powerful and influential lawyers practising in Britain today.
The Times remarked that Clive had come to particular prominence in the last year for his work with ex-Guantánamo-detainee Binyam Mohamed, more specifically the action in which we are currently involved, which deals with MI5’s complicity in torture. Lord Bingham became our Chair in January this year, although it ...
The very secrecy of secret evidence makes meaningful conversations on the subject rather tricky, but the Guardian has put together a panel of people with first-hand experience of the problems that arise when the British government witholds evidence from the courts. Clive is joined by Ian Cobain, Gareth Peirce and Ian MacDonald QC to talk about whether we can trust the government to use secret evidence honestly and fairly.
As a Reprieve Fellow in Texas, I work with prisoners who - like Willie Earl Pondexter, Jr. - are sentenced to death on the sole basis of 'future-dangerousness'.
The long history of the death penalty is rooted in our belief that the worst of the worst ought to be executed, not only for retribution but for protection. It is because of the latter that capital punishment eligibility in Texas revolves around a single question: does a man who commits a capital crime pose a future danger?
This is the question at the heart of the case of Mr. Willie Earl Pondexter, Jr ...
The U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services held a hearing on 07 July 2009 to determine the legal difficulties in continuing the military commissions held at Guantánamo Bay. I've listed some of the most alarming aspects here.
In case you missed it, President Obama has announced that military commissions will resume in Guantánamo. He has made five major changes to the Military Commissions Act 2006, namely that:
Are President Obama's Military Commissions, due to start this week, really any different from those designed by the Bush Administration?
Reprieve was dismayed by President Obama’s decision to resurrect 'kangaroo court' military commissions to try prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.
The Bush-era commissions are now acknowledged to have failed miserably. Even with President Obama’s tinkering, they remain structurally dysfunctional and incapable of delivering meaningful justice.
Here at Reprieve, we see no legal reason why the prisoners from Guantánamo cannot be processed in the American criminal court system. As Clive Stafford Smith has said, it is a sad day ...
I've spent the week in Lisbon, discussing how Portugal might offer more ex-Guantánamo prisoners a home.
In meetings with various organisations and government ministers, I described how all our Guantánamo clients have settled peacefully back into the community. The politicians were largely supportive, and my hunch is it was a very successful trip.
Back in December Reprieve were delighted when Portugal became the first European country to grant refugee status to detainees who had been declared innocent but could not return to their home countries for fear of persecution. Click here to read the press release.
Click below to ...
I don't much care if British officials are prosecuted for torture, I just want politicians to do all they can to stop it happening again.
Over the past two days, Ian Cobain has continued his excellent exposé of British complicity in torture in the Guardian. By now, few can doubt that in the eight years since 9/11 the British government has taken some steps that were illegal, others that were indubitably immoral and many more that were unwise.
The apologists for torture constantly propagate their myths to justify their nightmare. If it is not a ticking timebomb in ...
Mohammed el Gharani says thank you to the staff at Reprieve and all the people that have supported him during his time imprisoned in Guantanamo. Mohammed is finally free and with his family in Chad.
In March, Reprieve asked for supporters to send books to Mohammed el Gharani. Seized when he was only 14, Mohammed missed out on an education - but he loves reading, particularly history, and was keen to read ahead of his release.
We had a truly amazing response. The entire floor of one of our rooms at Reprieve was piled high with books, with many touching messages ...
The Human Face of Death Row, an exhibition exploring the human cost of the death penalty, is now open to the public following a successful launch night at the Oxo Gallery on London’s South Bank.
The exhibition, which runs until July 5th, is the result of a longstanding relationship between Claire Phillips, a British portrait artist, and Reprieve.
“A few years ago Reprieve brought Ryan and Pauline Mathews, whose portraits feature in the exhibition, over to England,” explains Phillips, the artist behind the project. “Pauline spoke of her experience of having her son come out of death row due ...
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