Asylum in Europe

After eight years’ imprisonment without charge or trial, five former Guantanamo prisoners are beginning new lives this week — two in Switzerland and three in Georgia. Their stories reveal, yet again, how Republican lawmakers and media pundits in the US, who have, in recent months, renewed their fear-filled attacks on those still held, are guilty [...]

Last Monday, the Supreme Court declined to review a case brought on behalf of seven men in Guantánamo whose release into the United States was ordered by a US judge 17 months ago. The men in question are Uighurs, Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, and the ruling ordering them to be rehoused in the US [...]

Last Wednesday, when the Spanish government announced that the first of up to five cleared Guantánamo prisoners to be offered new homes in Spain had arrived in the country (and three other men were given new homes in Albania), I noted that, although the Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba told reporters that the man [...]

On Wednesday, four prisoners were released from Guantánamo: an Egyptian, a Libyan and a Tunisian arrived in Albania, and a Palestinian arrived in Spain. All four had been cleared by military review boards at Guantánamo under the Bush administration, and had then been cleared by President Obama’s interagency Task Force, but, like dozens of prisoners [...]

Over the weekend, Polly Nash and I, co-directors of the new Guantánamo documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” travelled to Oslo, where our film had been chosen as part of the Human Rights, Human Wrongs Film Festival. Organized by Oslo Dokumentarkino and the Human Rights House Network of human rights organizations, the festival, [...]

Congratulations to the Swiss Canton of Jura, which recently accepted the asylum claims of two Uighur prisoners at Guantánamo, and to the Swiss federal government for agreeing to accept Jura’s decision on Wednesday. The two men in question — Arkin Mahmud, 45, and his brother Bahtiyar Mahnut, 32 — were seized with 20 other Uighurs [...]

Today, on the eighth anniversary of the first transfers to the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, human rights groups and lawyers — Amnesty International, Cageprisoners, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Reprieve — urged more European states, including Germany, Finland, Sweden and Luxembourg, to provide new homes for up to 50 prisoners, who cannot [...]

On December 21, the following article, written by Kevin Cullen, was published by the Boston Globe. It brings up to date the story of Oybek Jabbarov, an innocent man from Uzbekistan, held in Guantánamo for nearly eight years, who was finally freed in September and given a new home in Ireland. As I reported at [...]

From the Maldives, via a blogger named Firas, I found out that President Mohamed Nasheed (commonly known as Anni), the former Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience whose election in October 2008 finally brought to an end the 30-year dictatorship of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, has mentioned, in a radio address broadcast on the state radio station [...]

On Monday, the Obama administration announced that it had transferred four prisoners from Guantánamo: Sabir Lahmar, an Algerian, was transferred to France; an unidentified Palestinian was transferred to Hungary; and two Tunisians, Adel Ben Mabrouk bin Hamida Boughanmi and Mohammed Tahir Riyadh Nasseri, were transferred to the custody of the Italian government. Sabir Lahmar, an [...]