Shaker Aamer

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, I wrote about how the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, based in the home borough of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, had handed in an open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday, asking the PM and foreign secretary William Hague “to make the strongest representations possible to the US administration [...]

On Friday, unnoticed by the mainstream media, the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, established by concerned citizens from the borough of Wandsworth, where Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, has his home, and where his wife and children still live, handed in an open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron, asking Mr. Cameron and [...]

Sometimes the truth is so sickening that no one in a position of authority — senior government officials, lawmakers, the mainstream media — wants to go anywhere near it.
This appears to be the case with the deaths of three men at Guantánamo on June 9, 2006. According to the official version of events, Salah Ahmed [...]

On April 30, 2010, as I explained in Part One and Part Two of this three-part transcript, The UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas organized an event to mark the fifth anniversary of its excellent Guantánamo Testimonials Project, which, for the first time, enabled a discussion to take place, [...]

Just ten days ago, I drafted a letter for readers to send to their MPs, asking for their opinions on four particular topics: the closure of Guantánamo and the return to the UK of British resident Shaker Aamer; the use of secret evidence in UK courts; the continued existence of control orders for British and [...]

From 10 am onwards on Tuesday May 25, to coincide with the State Opening of Parliament, the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign (with the support of the London Guantánamo Campaign) has organized a protest in Parliament Square calling for the immediate return from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison. The protest, [...]

With the welcome news that foreign secretary William Hague has ordered a judicial inquiry into allegations of British complicity in torture, I’ve amended the letter to him that I drafted just four days ago, which, in addition to calling for the return from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (and [...]