All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Closure of Guantánamo Holds Inaugural Meeting in UK Parliament, April 24, 2023 with Mohamedou Ould Slahi

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On Monday April 24, at 5.30pm, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Closing of the Guantánamo Detention Facility will be holding its inaugural meeting in Committee Room 19 of the Palace of Westminster (the Houses of Parliament). Members of the public are welcome, but the room only holds a maximum of 40 people. If you want to attend, please enter by the Cromwell Green entrance from 3.45pm onwards. Campaigners, myself included, will be in the Palace of Westminster’s cafe from 4pm.

The co-chairs of the new APPG are Layla Moran MP (Liberal Democrat) and Chris Law MP (SNP), and other MPs include Sir Peter Bottomley (Conservative), Caroline Lucas (Green) and the Labour MPs John McDonnell, Richard Burgon, Rachael Maskell and Andy Slaughter. Peers include Sayeeda Warsi (Conservative) and the Labour peers Helena Kennedy, Shami Chakrabarti and John Hendy.

At this inaugural meeting, as a press release from Amnesty International UK explains, “the group of MPs and peers will hear an update on the current situation at Guantánamo, which still holds 30 detainees, 16 of them cleared for release but still detained.”

There has been relative flurry of releases from Guantánamo in recent months — six men in total since October, including one man, an Algerian, who was repatriated yesterday — but much of the hard work to close the prison still lies ahead. Of the 16 men unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes, 13 (eleven Yemenis, a Libyan and a Somali) cannot be repatriated because of US laws preventing any releases to their home countries, meaning that third countries must be found that are prepared to offer them new homes.

It is to be hoped that the APPG, as well as providing support and encouragement to the Biden administration in its ongoing efforts to close the prison, will also encourage the UK government to help out by offering homes to one or two of these men who cannot be sent to their home countries.

As the press release explained, “The formation of the new Parliamentary body has been supported over the past 12 months by a coalition of human rights, legal and campaigning groups working together with the UK Guantánamo Network”, which consists of members of various Amnesty groups in the UK, the Close Guantánamo campaign, the Guantánamo Justice Campaign, the London Guantánamo Campaign, and Freedom from Torture.

The inaugural meeting of the APPG will also be attended by former Guantánamo prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the author of the best-selling memoir Guantánamo Diary, whose incarceration and torture at Guantánamo featured in the 2021 film ‘The Mauritanian’, directed by Kevin Macdonald and starring Jodie Foster, Tahar Rahim and Benedict Cumberbatch.

One of the drivers of the push to create an APPG for the closure of Guantánamo was a UK speaking tour undertaken by Mohamedou in March 2022, at the end of which he was welcomed to Parliament by Layla Moran MP, where he also met other MPs and peers, including Richard Burgon and Helena Kennedy, as well as former Lib Dem MP Tom Brake, who had campaigned for his release in 2016.

Also attending the APPG will be Steve Wood, visiting from the US. Steve was, for some time, Mohamedou’s guard at Guantánamo, but came to realize that he was not the terrorist he had been told he was. Steve later converted to Islam, and was reunited with Mohamedou after his release, as chronicled in the 2021 Guardian film ‘My Brother’s Keeper.’

It is some time since UK Parliamentarians came together to call for the closure of Guantánamo. In 2014-15, a significant number of MPs were involved in an APPG calling for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, but it was difficult to maintain momentum after Mr. Aamer’s release in October 2015, and in the Trump years, from 2017 to 2020, it became all but impossible to engage with the US government in any meaningful way regarding Guantánamo.

Now is the perfect time for a new APPG to add its voice to growing international calls for the Biden administration to finally rid the world — and America’s conscience — of the stain that is Guantánamo, and I am enormously grateful to all the MPs and peers who have agreed to join the APPG, and, in particular, to Layla Moran and Chris Law, who have agreed to chair it.

As Sara Birch, the Convenor of the UK Guantánamo Network, said, “It’s heartening that Parliamentarians are taking a stand to call for the closure of the Guantánamo Detention Facility. By forming the APPG, MPs and peers are sending a strong message to the US administration that, after more than 21 years of detention without trial, it’s high time to end this affront to the rule of law.”

For further information, please contact Sara Birch on 07710 789616, or Neil Durkin at Amnesty UK on 07972 718826.

Further events involving Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Steve Wood and myself

In the days after the APPG, Mohamedou, Steve and myself are involved in a number of speaking events following screenings of ‘The Mauritanian’, which are listed below:

Tuesday April 25, 5.30pm: Royal Grammar School, Amersham Road, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, HP13 6QT. Screening of ‘The Mauritanian’, followed by a Q&A with Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Steve Wood and Andy Worthington. For further information, please email Khandan Lolaki-Noble.

Wednesday April 26, 5.30pm: National Film and Television School, Beaconsfield Studios, Station Road, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, HP9 1LG. Screening of ‘The Mauritanian’, followed by a Q&A with Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Steve Wood and Andy Worthington. To attend the NFTS event, please email Khandan Lolaki-Noble.

Friday April 28, 6pm: Huxley Lecture Theatre, Huxley Building, University of Brighton, Lewes Road, Brighton, East Sussex, BN2 4GJ. Screening of ‘The Mauritanian’, followed by a Q&A with Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Steve Wood and Andy Worthington. Free tickets available via the Ticket Source page here.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

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