Not content with having the largest domestic prison population in the world, both in numbers and as a percentage of the total population, the US also imports prisoners from other countries, at vast expense.

Last week, five men were extradited to the US from the UK to face charges relating to their alleged involvement with terrorism. The men’s extradition was supposed to have been made into a straightforward matter by the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who, in 2003, approved the US-UK Extradition Treaty, which purportedly allows prisoners to be extradited without the need for any evidence to be provided.

However, there have been sustained legal challenges to the treaty, with the result that, of the five men extradited last week, two British nationals, Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan, had been held without charge or trial in the UK for eight and six years respectively, and two foreign nationals, Adel Abdel Bary and Khaled al-Fawwaz, had been held without charge or trial since 1998, as their lawyers tried to prevent their extradition. The fifth man, Abu Hamza al-Masri, was the only one to have been imprisoned in the UK after a trial. Convicted in 2006, he was given a seven-year sentence. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Monday, the long struggle of five alleged “terror suspects” against their extradition to the US — under the much-criticised US-UK Extradition Treaty of 2003 — was struck an apparently fatal blow when the European Court of Human Rights refused to hear an appeal they had submitted after the Court first approved their extradition in April. The five men are Babar Ahmad, Syed Talha Ahsan, Mustafa Kamel Mustafa (better known as Abu Hamza al-Masri), Khaled al-Fawwaz and Adel Abdel Bary.

The decision is a blow to human rights defenders, who rightly believe that conditions in US Supermax prisons, where the men would end up, constitute torture, and that they have no chance of receiving a fair trial, as almost all trials involving Muslims accused of terrorism, or providing support to terrorism, end in convictions. It also ignores criticism of the treaty by British MPs on the Home Affairs Select Committee, who, in March, criticised the Home Office for “failing to publish the evidence” that lay behind a review of the treaty, undertaken by Sir Scott Baker for the home secretary Teresa May, which, as the Independent put it, found that “it was balanced and there was no basis to see it as ‘unfair or oppressive.'” In contrast, the committee said it had “‘serious misgivings’ about some aspects of the US-UK arrangements and recommended the Government renegotiate the treaty.”

In response to the ruling, two of the men, Abu Hamza and Khaled al-Fawwaz, have launched immediate legal challenges, and in the cases of two others, Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan, a businessman, Karl Watkin, has launched a private prosecution to try to prevent their extradition, arguing that they should be tried in the UK because their alleged crime — hosting a pro-jihad website — took place in Britain. The US government argues that it has the right to try the two men, because one of the servers was located in the US. Read the rest of this entry »

Critics of the European Court of Human Rights, which, in February, refused to allow the UK to deport the Muslim cleric Abu Qatada to Jordan, were delighted when, on April 10, the court turned down an appeal by five other men who were seeking to prevent their extradition to the US, on the grounds that their human rights would be violated if they were sent to the US to stand trial, However, as those critics are generally driven by anti-Islamic “war on terror” hysteria and disdain for the European Court and for the European Convention on Human Rights — and especially the legislation designed to prevent torture and to ensure fair trials — their delight is not something that should necessarily be emulated or encouraged.

The five men are Abu Hamza, Babar Ahmad, Syed Talha Ahsan, Adel Abdel Bary and Khaled al-Fawwaz. As the Guardian described it, the European judges “decided they needed more information about the mental health” of a sixth man, Haroon Aswat, an aide to Abu Hamza who has suffered such a precipitous decline in is mental health that he has been been held in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, before reaching a decision on him.

Of the five, Abu Hamza (or Abu Hamza al-Masri), whose real name is Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, is the best known, or perhaps the most notorious — a half-blind, hook-handed firebrand preacher, born in Egypt but a British citizen for nearly 30 years, who was tried, convicted and given a seven-year sentence in 2006 for charges of soliciting to murder, and other charges related to “stirring up racial hatred.” Read the rest of this entry »