Binyam Mohamed

On Monday, the Pentagon announced that two prisoners had been released from Guantánamo. Abd al-Nisr Mohammed Khantumani, a 50-year old Syrian (also known as Abdul Nasir al-Tumani) was given a new home in Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony off the West African coast, while Abdul Aziz Naji, a 35-year old Algerian, was repatriated to [...]

In a detailed and strongly-worded letter to Sir Peter Gibson, chosen by Prime Minster David Cameron to lead an inquiry into British complicity in the torture of British nationals and residents abroad, Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve, has called on Gibson to step down from his role as the [...]

With what the Guardian described yesterday as the “almost unprecedented” release of “security service reports of interviews with detainees in Guantánamo Bay and other overseas detention centres,” the coalition government failed in its attempt to persuade the High Court to bring a temporary halt to a civil claim for damages filed by six former Guantánamo [...]

Human rights campaigners have reacted with cautious optimism to the British government’s official announcement of a judicial inquiry into the involvement of the British security services — MI5 and MI6 — in torture and rendition since the 9/11 attacks, although many pressing questions are, as yet, unanswered.
These concern the scope of the inquiry, its transparency [...]

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when the United States — the post-World War II driver of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions, prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment — went off the rails and introduced a horrendous global program of rendition, torture, arbitrary detention [...]

Yesterday was the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, established by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1997, to mark the ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment on June 26, 1987.
As UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan explained on June 26, 1998 (when the [...]

To complement my recent article, “UN Human Rights Council Discusses Secret Detention Report,” in which I explained how, two weeks ago, the UN Human Rights Council had — after some delays — finally discussed the findings of the “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” a detailed, [...]

On June 2 last year, the Pentagon announced that a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo, Mohammed al-Hanashi (also known as Muhammad Salih) had died, reportedly by committing suicide. He was the fifth reported suicide at Guantánamo, following three deaths on June 9, 2006 and another on May 30, 2007, and he was the sixth man to [...]

Some horrors may await us on the economic front when George Osborne, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, finishes sharpening his scythe, but for those of us who care about human rights and civil liberties, and who have been aghast for the last 13 years at the Labour government’s paranoid, cruel and chaotic anti-terror legislation, [...]

“[T]his is a strong movie examining the imprisonment and subsequent torture of those falsely accused of anti-American conspiracy.”
Joe Burnham, Time Out
Now that we have a new government — involving an unprecedented coalition between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats — the ongoing UK tour of the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” [...]