Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
By Richard Tomsett, Reprieve volunteer
The US government has continued its penchant for rebranding the facts at Guantanamo Bay.
This latest example of rose-tinted fact distortion follows a long list of euphemistic spin on the abuses of human rights at Guantanamo Bay by the US government. Top of any list of such doublespeak would of course have to be the terrifyingly transparent rebranding of ‘torture’ as ‘enhanced interrogation’. And a few weeks ago, the prison authorities said there was no hunger strike, despite evidence presented by lawyers that almost all of the men in Camp 6 are on hunger strike ...
Last week, Reprieve received a despairing letter from Ahmed Belbacha, one of our clients in Guantanamo Bay. Cleared for release since 2007, Ahmed fears being forcibly repatriated to his native Algeria, where he was convicted in absentia during a sham trial, and where he would almost certainly be tortured or thrown in prison upon his return. Yet like other detainees, he is prohibited from being re-settled in a third country due to the Kafka-esque provisions of the NDAA 2013 (and its predecessors of the last three years). Thus, as Ahmed’s lawyers, we have unfortunately become accustomed to receiving despondent ...
Here are five key reasons you should oppose the Government's plans for Secret Courts, contained in the Justice and Security Bill. Please write to your MP to help us stop these dangerous plans - for more information and advice on how to do so, click here.
1. They will allow governments to cover up their involvement in serious crimes such as torture
The Bill will allow the government to push cases into secret courts, in order to avoid having its dirty laundry aired in public. The press, the public and even the other side in the case will be shut ...
I've been making films about the death penalty for some time now, and this statistic really jumped out at me. With my colleague Mark, we got to thinking that a one in 10 failure rate for anything is unacceptable, let alone sentencing people to the ultimate punishment.
Around the same time, we'd been looking for ways to turn traditional documentary filmmaking on its head - we wanted to find a new way of producing social issue films that would allow people to engage with them, rather than just watching them. In the past, we'd both been frustrated that ...
I had been paying a regular visit to our small team of Tunisian fellows, a doctor, a psychiatrist, a social worker and the head of the project, who run a reintegration and rehabilitation programme for Tunisian former Guantanamo detainees and their families, as well as the families of the men, who despite having been cleared for release, remain detained.
That morning, a prominent labour activist and political figure, Shokry Belaid, was assassinated—shot at point blank range—outside his house. With all of the violence and political upheaval that has followed in the past 24 hours, it is hard not ...
Last week, lawyers for the police were partly successful in pushing a case concerning what has been described as the "sexual and psychological abuse of campaigners for social justice... by undercover police officers" into a secret tribunal, from which little if any evidence of just how this was allowed to happen will emerge.
For now, that is not the end of the story - the judge ruled that although part of the case, brought by women who say they were deceived into having sex with undercover police officers, will be heard by the intensely secretive Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), this will ...
The US’ practice of holding people without charge or trial indefinitely has just become more definite. A problem which Obama promised to sort out as his first act as President has just become more intractable. The State Department office responsible for shuttering Guantánamo has just itself been shuttered.
The hushed and largely overlooked State Department ”departmental notice”—released in the media dead zone of late Friday afternoon—quietly announces that the Office for the Special Envoy for the Closure of Guantánamo Bay has been, ironically, closed. It is impossible to read this as anything but the final nail ...
I recently returned from maternity leave. I am now the proud mother of an adorable daughter. However, the process of becoming a mother was by no means easy. Towards the end of my pregnancy, I was diagnosed with a rare condition which endangered my baby’s life and meant that the birth had to be artificially induced. Once my daughter was born, I had to be rushed to the operating theatre for an emergency procedure. And then, after several more nights in hospital, followed the exhausting first few months with a new baby: the sleep deprivation, the struggle to get ...
In an opinion handed down two days before the international community mourns the 11th anniversary of the first men being sent to Guantanamo Bay, a judge has ruled that the U.S. Government may rely on Top Secret evidence without sharing that information with the detainee’s lawyers – even if the material could be relevant to the prisoner’s case.
In 2005 Afghan detainee, Wali Mohammed Morafa brought a habeas case to challenge his ongoing detention. During the discovery phase of the case – where each side discloses information to the other - the lawyers for the US government came across ...
In 2010 one of Reprieve’s clients, Younis Chikkouri, wrote a letter to his lawyer. In it, he said this: “Think about where you were eight years ago; think of everything that’s happened in your life since then. That is why I will go, with gratitude, to any place that will have me.”
Three years have passed since Younis wrote that despairing letter.
Today, the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay turns eleven. For the 166 men still there, 2013 was rung in with the knowledge that unless there is a dramatic about-face in US policy or a resurgence ...
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