Belmarsh, control orders, deportation and extradition

Just before the election, I created a list of 149 MPs (out of 650 in total), who had signed up to two important Early Day Motions over the previous 12 months. The first opposed the use of secret evidence in UK courts, particularly in the cases of terror suspects (both British and foreign nationals), where [...]

Today, the UK adapts to new political realities — a Tory Prime Minister, for the first time since 1997, a unique coalition between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, and a Labour party, leaderless and in opposition, having apparently blown its opportunity to forge a fragile coalition with the Lib Dems through ferocious opposition to [...]

With 649 out of 650 results declared in the 2010 General Election, it is now confirmed that no party has an outright majority. The Tories won 306 seats (20 short of a majority), Labour won 258, the Liberal Democrats won 57 and other parties won 28.
For those who hoped that electoral reform would be significant [...]

For anyone wondering how to vote in the General Election today, who may have noticed the resounding silence on the election trail regarding Britain’s commitment to human rights since the 9/11 attacks, I’ve compiled the following list of 149 MPs (out of 650 in total), who have signed up to two important Early Day Motions [...]

In the Court of Appeal yesterday morning, six former Guantánamo prisoners — Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil El-Banna, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes, Binyam Mohamed and Martin Mubanga — won a resounding victory against the government, when three senior judges, including Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, overturned a ruling that, for the first time in British [...]

In a previous article, I wrote about Mustapha Labsi, an Algerian terror suspect, shuttled between various European prisons for the last nine years, who was deported from Slovakia last week “in clear violation of Slovakia’s international obligations,” as Amnesty International explained. Mustapha Labsi was held in Belmarsh until 2006, when he was extradited to France [...]

On April 19, Mustapha Labsi, an Algerian terror suspect shuttled around prisons in Europe since his arrest in the UK in February 2001, lost his struggle to resist being forcibly repatriated. Labsi was returned to Algeria from Slovakia, even though, as Amnesty International explained, this was “in clear violation of Slovakia’s international obligations.” Pointing out [...]

In America’s post-9/11 zeal for elevating terror suspects to the status of supermen, existentially threatening the very life of the United States in an unprecedented manner (rather than managing one massive attack on the US through the intelligence agencies’ inability to communicate with one another), Guantánamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib and the CIA’s torture dungeons are [...]

Former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes and I have just returned from an excellent week-long trip to Scotland, where we were promoting the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (directed by Polly Nash and myself) as part of an ongoing UK tour of the film. We also encouraged audiences to write to foreign [...]

Tomorrow (March 1), Parliament will vote on whether to renew the government’s control order regime, a form of house arrest for alleged terrorist suspects, who are held without charge or trial on the basis of secret evidence. This lamentable system was established in haste in 2005, when the Law Lords ruled that the government’s previous [...]