Binyam Mohamed

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Note: This article is one of the last two articles published as part of “Guantánamo Habeas Week” (introduced here, and also see the articles here, here, here and here), which I extended to become “Guantánamo Habeas Fortnight.” This project also includes an interactive list of all 47 rulings to date (with links to my articles, [...]