Guantanamo and habeas corpus

Last Tuesday, while activists, journalists and lawyers were holding a rally outside The White House to ask President Obama to honor his pledge to close Guantánamo, and to raise awareness of the plight of the remaining 173 prisoners, Judge Richard Leon, in the District Court down the road, refused to grant the habeas petition of […]

Political prisoners? Surely that can’t be right, can it? Surely it’s only dictatorships in far-flung corners of the world who hold political prisoners, and not the United States of America? Sadly, no. As the “War on Terror” prison established by President Bush begins its tenth year of operations, and as it begins to be forgotten […]

On the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, it may sound uncharitable to President Obama to be asking whether all plans to close the prison have failed, and to be asking whether it might remain in operation for as long as anyone can foresee. After all, the President may have failed to close it […]

On Christmas Day, I wrote an article reminding readers of the plight of the remaining 174 prisoners in Guantánamo, and specifically focusing on the case of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a mentally troubled Yemeni prisoner who has attempted to commit suicide on several occasions. Despite being cleared for release in 2007 by the Bush administration, […]

With just two weeks to go before the ninth anniversary of the opening of the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo, almost everyone in a position of authority in the US has failed to resolve, in a satisfactory manner, the bitter legacy left by the Bush administration. In fact, to judge by two recent developments, […]

Ten days ago, when I traveled to Sheffield with my friend, the former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, for a screening of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (which I co-directed with Polly Nash), I asked Omar what Guantánamo was like at Christmas, as I knew that he had spent five Christmases imprisoned […]

On December 22, during a largely self-congratulatory news conference by President Obama, dealing with a number of achievements notched up in the last session before the Democrats lose control of the House of Representatives (including the new START treaty, on arms control, and the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell”), one of the administration’s conspicuous […]

In an attempt to bring to an end a nearly four-year deadlock in the case of Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian prisoner in Guantánamo, lawyers at the London-based legal action charity Reprieve have “started high court proceedings to force the British government to disclose information that they say could free him from Guantánamo Bay and save […]

Delayed by a month due to other demands (primarily, a visit to the US and the trial by Military Commission of Omar Khadr), this is the eighth part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (174 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part […]

In the struggle in the US courts to establish who can be detained at Guantánamo, and on what basis, following the Supreme Court’s ruling, in June 2008, that the Guantánamo prisoners have constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, there are three main players: the District Court judges, who, in 57 cases over the last two years, […]