The Great Debate UK

Doubts linger over Obama’s Guantanamo intentions

-Clare Algar is executive director of Reprieve. The opinions expressed are her own.-

Disappointed, but not surprised, was my first response to hearing President Barack Obama’s announcement on Wednesday that he would not make the January 22 deadline for closing the prison in Guantanamo Bay.

During attorney visits over the past few weeks, Reprieve’s clients in Guantanamo have expressed their doubts regarding whether President Obama can live up to his promise to close the prison within a year of assuming office. ‘What is he going to do,’ one man asked, “put 200 people on a plane on the 22nd?”

And it is true – the maths doesn’t work.  Around 245 prisoners were being held in Guantánamo when Obama was inaugurated in January of this year and only around 30 men have left since then. If releases continue at this snail’s pace, the prison won’t close until at least 2017.

Who are the people who are left in the prison and why is it proving so hard to close? First there are the 90 or so prisoners from Yemen who the United States will not repatriate because of the country’s instability.  Another 65 people are considered prosecutable in federal courts or military commissions, the details of which are still being hammered out (the latest development being the recent announcement of the future transfer of five men, accused of involvement in Sept. 11 to U.S. Federal Courts for prosecution).

Then there is a group of around 60 men – Guantanamo’s refugees – 18 of whom are represented by Reprieve. Many of these people have been “cleared for release” by United States authorities, meaning they have been deemed to present no threat whatsoever.  These men would be free to leave Guantanamo tomorrow but they remain stranded there because they cannot return to their countries of origin for fear of torture.

They are from places like Uzbekistan, Syria, China, Algeria and Tunisia, countries where their being branded “terrorists” – despite them having been cleared – will make them sitting ducks for authorities with Kafka-esque human rights records.

A Bagram betrayal

– Clive Stafford Smith is the director of Reprieve, the UK legal action charity that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners. The opinions expressed are his own. -

As the British death toll climbed above 200 in Afghanistan this week, it became clearer that the politicians were betraying the soldiers who they were sending to fight and die.

The government talks about winning the battle for “hearts and minds” in Helmand Province – apparently oblivious to the loaded history of that phrase. This was the mantra of those who wasted 50,000 American lives in a futile battle to impose democracy at the end of a gun barrel in Vietnam.

Napalm never won an election, and nobody can expect an Afghan to warm to the rule of law when he witnesses his people being locked up in Bagram Air Force Base every day — abused and held without trial for years in Guantanamo’s evil twin. Bagram already holds three times as many prisoners as the Cuban black hole, and $50 million is being spent on a new prison that will add another 1,100 cells.

Captain Kirk Black, an American soldier I met in Guantanamo Bay, is now stationed in the dusty backroad of Afghanistan. He e-mailed, asking Reprieve to represent Gul Khan, a local sheep farmer who had been locked up in Bagram in error. He said that if we could bring justice to an Afghan peasant, then he and his platoon would be a little bit safer. Gul Khan is now back with his flock, and I hope Capt. Black gets credit for his release.

Conversely, British politicians are endangering the lives of soldiers when they conspire with their American allies to perpetuate injustice in Bagram. This, ultimately, is the headline of the latest litigation we announced yesterday.

The background facts show Britain’s complicity in another illegal act of rendition. In 2004, the British arrested two men in Iraq, and turned them over to the Americans, who took them to Bagram. The men remain there to this day, daily abused and divorced from the most basic due process.

The real torture is in the waiting

- Marc Callcutt is a casework lawyer for the Reprieve Death Penalty team. The opinions expressed are his own.-

Exactly five years ago, the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, two Britons, Naheem Hussain and Rehan Zaman, were in Dadyal Police Station, in Pakistan having been arrested on murder charges.

The police used their usual interrogation techniques. Rehan was hung upside down, in what is known as an inverse strappado, and had one of his finger nails pulled out. Naheem was tied to a chair and had red chillies rubbed in his eyes. Both had the police attempt to break their legs, and both were subjected to hours of falaka – a torture that involves whipping of the feet with a rod or cane, used because it is incredibly painful but leaves few scars. The torture was such that in the end, both of them signed “confessions” accepting their role in the murders.

Yet, if you talk to the two men now, it is not the 14 days of torture they suffered at the hands of the police they will complain about, but rather their ongoing torture at the hands of the Pakistan criminal justice system. Five years on, they remain in prison, unconvicted, desperate for their trial. Every day they wake up uncertain of how long they will remain in prison – the potential of the death penalty hanging over them like the sword of Damocles. They will tell you that this torture is much crueller than anything that they faced at the hands of the police. Rehan in particular has been told Reprieve that if his case fails to progress by the end of the year he will be forced to “sentence himself”.

The mental anguish that those on death row suffer has become so common that in legal circles it is simply known as “the death row phenomena” and courts have had to take action to limit such suffering. The European Court of Human Rights refused to allow the extradition of a German national to the U.S. on the basis that the “ever-present and mounting anguish of awaiting execution” was a breach of his right not to suffer torture or inhuman or degrading treatment. Similarly, the Privy Council here in the UK decided that to carry out an execution “after holding [defendants] in an agony of suspense” for more than five years would be inhuman and degrading.

If Naheem and Rehan were being held within the Privy Council’s jurisdiction, there would be no chance of them facing execution now that their case has been delayed for more than five years. The courts would simply not permit this tortuous status quo to continue. In fact, the case against both men would be thrown out, given the physical torture that they both were subjected to on their arrest. Instead though, their case limps on – seemingly years away from a conclusion.

Now Reprieve, along with their local lawyers, is working ensure that the torture they suffered five years ago is properly investigated, and no evidence gathered during those 14 days of brutality is used against them at their trial. The British government did contact the Pakistan authorities to request such an investigation, but months have passed and they are yet to have a response. Meanwhile, Naheem and Rehan have remained in prison. Now the Prime Minister himself needs to raise the issue with President Zadari, if we are to see any progress.

No we can’t: Obama’s Guantanamo

- Cori Crider represents 30 Guantánamo prisoners as an attorney with legal charity Reprieve. The opinions expressed are her own. -

You would be hard-pressed to find a kid more thrilled on Barack Obama’s first day in office than Mohammed el Gharani. On January 21, had you been standing at the right corner of Guantanamo Bay, you could have heard him whoop for joy when the U.S. President made history—so we thought—by closing the prison where el Gharani grew up.

It is four months since that decision. The president gave a speech, “clarifying” his plans for Guantanamo on Thursday. But I fear we will all look back on May 21, 2009, as the day real history was made—The Day President Obama Un-Closed Guantanamo.

In many ways the die seems already cast. The President revived the military commissions last week, a move that risks stretching the prison’s life out for months. Just two prisoners have left Guantanamo since January. One, Binyam Mohamed, had humiliated the U.S. and the UK over his torture; the other, Lakhdar Boumediene, had been ordered released by a federal judge.

It is unclear what the administration is waiting for in Mohammed el Gharani’s case. He was found innocent in court, just like Boumediene, and he has a country to go to. He could climb on a plane to Chad tomorrow, were the administration simply to wake up and do what it has been ordered to do.

In this, el Gharani is luckier than many—namely, Guantanamo’s sixty refugees, who require the U.S. or a goodwilled third country to save them from torture at home. For these men, the administration’s dithering spells disaster. For while the government frittered away the global goodwill that would have helped them house refugees in January, the right regrouped.

Samantha Orobator: On trial in Laos

– Clive Stafford Smith is the director of Reprieve, the UK legal action charity that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Samantha Orobator, a 20 year old British woman, is languishing in the Phonthong Prison in Laos, on a capital charge of carrying a pound and a half of drugs in her luggage. Under the languid Laotian legal system, she would normally have waited two years or more for a trial. However, the Laotians accelerated the schedule, announcing late on Thursday that the trial would be held this Monday. They omitted a few of the niceties: She faced the firing squad without a lawyer.

Anna Morris, our Reprieve barrister from London, was scheduled to meet with her on Tuesday, which may have contributed to the chosen trial date. Criticizing the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party is a criminal offense. Perhaps calling for a fair trial is considered too close to the line; the government reneged on its promise, made before Anna flew 9,344 kilometres (5,806 miles) from London to Laos, to allow three days of legal visits.

Controversy envelopes Samantha. She has been in prison since August 6, 2008, and yet she is due to give birth on September 6, 2009. Khenthong Nuanthasing, the Lao government spokesman, spoke to the BBC Tuesday morning. When asked whether Samantha became pregnant in the prison, he replied: “That’s impossible. A man or guard cannot act in that way *** she was pregnant when she was arrested in August.”

One might be sceptical at this. It would mean her gestation period was at least 13 months which, while plausible were she a blue whale, is not what we expect of human beings. Later Mr Nuanthasing changed his version of events, indicating that she might have been pregnant when she was arrested, but that she lost the first baby while in prison.

How she became pregnant is one pressing issue, but perhaps of most immediate concern is her health and the health of her unborn child. If she has already had one miscarriage in the prison, then Samantha must add it to one she suffered in 2006, when she was beaten by her boyfriend with a bicycle chain.

The Laotians announced Tuesday that they would not execute a pregnant woman, but they planned to plough forward with her trial within the next week, when she faces life in prison. Her prospects are dim. The U.S. State Department, in its 2008 report on Laos, notes that all judges have to be party members, and that a trial such as Samantha’s will be a foregone conclusion, stating quaintly that “judges usually decided guilt or innocence in advance…”