Uyghurs in Guantanamo

Some of us have known for years that the US administration’s basis for holding prisoners without charge or trial in the “War on Terror” has more to do with a fantasy world in which nonsense masquerades as truth, logic is skewed, and nothing that is uttered remotely resembles evidence that would stand up in a [...]

In the history of legal challenges to the Bush administration’s assertion that it can hold “War on Terror” prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial, Parhat v. Gates has just joined a trio of Supreme Court verdicts — Rasul v. Bush (2004), Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006) and Boumediene v. Bush (twelve days ago) — as significant [...]

In a blow to hopes that Sweden could be persuaded to lead the way in offering asylum to some of the 70 or so prisoners in Guantánamo who have been cleared for release but who cannot be returned to their home countries because of international treaties preventing the return of foreign nationals to countries where [...]

The stories of the Uyghurs in Guantánamo — Muslims from the oppressed Xinjiang province of China, formerly known as East Turkistan — have long demonstrated chronic injustice on the part of the US authorities to those who know of them, although they have only sporadically registered on the media’s radar.

Numbering 22 men in total, three [...]

Adel Abdul Hakim, an ethnic Uighur, is one of five former Guantánamo detainees from China, who were cleared of all wrongdoing after a military review board, but who could not be repatriated because of fears that they would be tortured on their return. After trawling the world looking for countries that would accept former Guantánamo [...]