Ahmed Belbacha

I’m delighted to report that three screenings of the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (directed by Polly Nash and myself), which is currently on a UK tour, have been arranged by pioneering grass-roots activists in the US. All the screenings are free, and Polly and I, and the production company Spectacle, [...]

Throughout 2010, former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes and I are touring the UK, showing the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (directed by Polly Nash and myself). The film focuses on the stories of three British residents — Shaker Aamer, Binyam Mohamed and Omar — and throughout the tour we are encouraging [...]

On Monday January 11, as part of activities in London to highlight the eighth anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, and to demand justice for the 198 men still held, Johina Aamer, daughter of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident held at the prison, delivered a letter to Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street, asking [...]

As rumors swirl, suggesting that a number of the remaining 13 Uighur prisoners in Guantánamo (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province) may soon be relocating to the tiny Pacific island state of Palau, a court case relating to nine of these men threatens to hurl a number of other prisoners in Guantánamo, who have also been [...]

On Monday, the European Union and the United States made a joint statement in Luxembourg “on the Closure of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility and Future Counterterrorism Operations, based on Shared Values, International Law, and Respect for the Rule of Law and Human Rights” (PDF), which, as the Guardian put it, “cleared the last hurdles [...]

The continued imprisonment of at least 61 prisoners at Guantánamo, who have been cleared for release after multiple military review boards (or, in recent months, after rulings in a US court), was an affront to notions of justice when the Bush administration was in power, and is even more so now that Barack Obama, who [...]

As rumors continue to fly regarding Barack Obama’s plans to close the notorious “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, one country in the European Union, Portugal, took the opportunity offered last Wednesday by the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — one of whose Articles declares, “Everyone has the right to [...]

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, looks at the US authorities’ recent underhand attempts to return cleared prisoners from Guantánamo to regimes where they face the risk of torture, despite US court orders preventing their enforced repatriation.
For many of the prisoners at Guantánamo, the forthcoming US Presidential election holds little promise of change. Although [...]

It doesn’t take much investigation to discover that Algeria has a bleak human rights record, which is one of the reasons that, until last week, when 49-year old Mustafa Hamlili and 28-year old Abdul Raham Houari were freed from Guantánamo, no Algerian prisoners had been repatriated. This was in spite of the fact that at [...]

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, explains why news that four British residents are to be released from Guantánamo provides grounds for cautious celebration, but also points out that two British residents will not be coming home.
I was at a mosque in Glasgow on [...]