Moazzam Begg

Despite numerous references to Guantánamo in the 251,287 US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, which deal largely with negotiations to rehouse cleared prisoners who could not — or cannot — be repatriated because of fears of torture or other ill-treatment in their home countries, there has been almost no mention of why this need to [...]

Forgive me, dear readers, for bombarding you with articles about the financial settlement recently reached between the British government, 15 former Guantánamo prisoners and Shaker Aamer, the remaining British resident in Guantánamo, and for repeating, over the last week, since this story first broke, that sustained pressure must be exerted on both the British and American goverments to [...]

In the Wandsworth Guardian, tenacious reporter Paul Cahalan has, for many years, covered the story of the former Battersea resident Shaker Aamer, who is still held in Guantánamo, despite being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration in 2007. As has been revealed in the last few days, Shaker is [...]

The official announcement on Tuesday in the House of Commons, by Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke, that the govermment has reached a financial settlement with a number of former Guantánamo prisoners brings to an end a court case that promised to be long, expensive and full of disturbing revelations about British complicity in torture and abuse. [...]

Today, the British government will announce that it will pay millions of pounds in compensation to a number of former Guantánamo prisoners, including Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes, Binyam Mohamed, Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil El-Banna, Richard Belmar and Martin Mubanga, who, since last year, have been involved in a civil claim for damages against the intelligence agencies [...]

I was in the United States, campaigning against torture as part of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, when a new book of essays by human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice, was published in the UK. In these essays, originally published in the London [...]

Over the last 18 months, as part of the slow-moving process of closing Guantánamo, the Obama administration — having refused to offer new homes on the US mainland to cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture — has prevailed on other countries to help out. To date, 37 former [...]

I’m cross-posting below an extraordinary account by former Guantánamo prisoner (and Cageprisoners director) Moazzam Begg of his first visit to Pakistan since he was abducted from his house in Islamabad on January 31, 2002, and subsequently held in US custody — in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo — for three years. Moazzam’s account includes retracing his [...]

Back in February, a distressing Islamophobic fuse was lit when Gita Sahgal, the head of the gender unit at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International, criticized Amnesty for its association with former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners, the organization of which he is the director, in the pages of the Sunday Times, via a [...]

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, [...]