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Clare Algar on 15 March 2012
A "chilling threat to liberty and justice" an "excessive and dangerous" move which would "shake our constitution to its common law roots" tilting it "towards the closed courts...so favoured by despots" and miring individuals in "Kafkaesque cases."
The disturbing potential of the government's plans to extend secret justice across the country's civil courts has hit the headlines, with the Mail, Times, Guardian, Independent and FT all united in condemnation.
That sense of alarm is also becoming apparent among the Lib Dems. Tom Brake MP, chair of the party's backbench Home Affairs committee, has described the Justice ...
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Gabriela Belmar-Valencia on 07 March 2012
My name’s Gabriela and I'm a 26 year-old law graduate. For the past six months I’ve been volunteering with Reprieve's Secret Prisons and Extraordinary Renditions team, doing work that I’ve fallen in love with.
So what do Guantanamo Bay prisoners, secret flights and drone strikes in Pakistan have to do with me? Why have I chosen to involve myself in this particular battle? The answer to that is complex.
Although I was born and bred in the UK, I’m originally from a Chilean background. My parents fled Chile after the 1985 CIA backed military ...
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Charlie Dunlavey on 24 February 2012
For nearly eight years, the UK government has refused to even name him. Until we discovered his identity, he was a ghost detainee, known simply as ‘Prisoner B’.
It was only after legal action charity Reprieve took the government to court over their refusal to demand his release from the prison at Bagram that they finally referred to him as Yunus Rahmatullah, one of two men abducted by British security forces in Iraq over eight years ago, handed to the US, and rendered to the notorious American-run prison at the Afghani airbase.
On Monday morning, at the English Court of ...
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Clive Stafford Smith on 23 February 2012
When is a promise no promise at all? Sadly, when the US makes a promise and then decides it's inconvenient.
This week, the US chose to break a highly significant promise made to the UK. Indeed, it was a binding legal obligation. A 29-year-old Pakistani man named Yunus Rahmatullah was detained by UK forces in Iraq in February 2004. The US and the UK had a memorandum of understanding (MoU), a promise between parties: if the UK transferred Rahmatullah into US hands, the US would treat him consistent with the Geneva conventions and, if the UK asked, would return ...
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Katie Taylor on 22 February 2012
Last week's report on ex-Guantanamo prisoners 're-engaging' with terrorism is laughable at best and dangerous at worst. But that won't stop it being exploited by those who want to keep the prison open.
As a member of Reprieve's Life After Guantanamo team, working to resettle prisoners around the world, last week's Report by the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Armed Services should have been a useful source of valuable information.
The report claims to be an “in-depth, comprehensive bipartisan investigation of procedures to dispatch detainees from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility”. As ...
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Owen Bubbers on 21 February 2012
On 27th January, state legislator Brenda Council voluntarily withdrew her bill to abolish the death penalty in Nebraska in spite of encouraging bipartisan support.
Why? Because Council wants to get to the bottom of the State’s murky purchase of sodium thiopental which “needs to be fully vetted as a part of this debate”. Two death row inmates, Michael Ryan and Carey Dean Moore, say the purchase was illegal and the drugs should not be used in their executions.
Ryan, whose execution date is set for 6th March, and Moore accuse the Nebraskan Department of Corrections of purchasing a ...
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Lucy Larkins on 20 February 2012
When Britain joined the coalition of the willing and invaded Iraq, it argued that our involvement was necessary because Saddam Hussein was threatening world peace by harbouring weapons of mass destruction. It’s old history now that the government was wrong. We had the decency to withdraw and much of the chaos we caused has faded from the headlines. Until now. Our activities in Iraq have come back to haunt us in a case being heard in the Court of Appeal today.
In the early period of the invasion, when the frantic hunt for WMDs was at its height, British ...
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Cori Crider on 16 February 2012
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 ...
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Donald Campbell on 10 February 2012
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 ...
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Cori Crider on 06 February 2012
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 ...
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