Moazzam Begg

The official announcement on Tuesday in the House of Commons, by Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke, that the govermment has reached a financial settlement with a number of former Guantánamo prisoners brings to an end a court case that promised to be long, expensive and full of disturbing revelations about British complicity in torture and abuse. […]

Today, the British government will announce that it will pay millions of pounds in compensation to a number of former Guantánamo prisoners, including Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes, Binyam Mohamed, Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil El-Banna, Richard Belmar and Martin Mubanga, who, since last year, have been involved in a civil claim for damages against the intelligence agencies […]

I was in the United States, campaigning against torture as part of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, when a new book of essays by human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice, was published in the UK. In these essays, originally published in the London […]

Over the last 18 months, as part of the slow-moving process of closing Guantánamo, the Obama administration — having refused to offer new homes on the US mainland to cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture — has prevailed on other countries to help out. To date, 37 former […]

I’m cross-posting below an extraordinary account by former Guantánamo prisoner (and Cageprisoners director) Moazzam Begg of his first visit to Pakistan since he was abducted from his house in Islamabad on January 31, 2002, and subsequently held in US custody — in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo — for three years. Moazzam’s account includes retracing his […]

Back in February, a distressing Islamophobic fuse was lit when Gita Sahgal, the head of the gender unit at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International, criticized Amnesty for its association with former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners, the organization of which he is the director, in the pages of the Sunday Times, via a […]

To complement my recent article, “UN Human Rights Council Discusses Secret Detention Report,” in which I explained how, two weeks ago, the UN Human Rights Council had — after some delays — finally discussed the findings of the “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” a detailed, […]

On reflection, two days before the General Election was a weird time to be travelling anywhere to show “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” the new documentary film, co-directed by Polly Nash and myself, which former prisoner Omar Deghayes and I have been touring since February. This week it was as though the impetus to […]

All week, the journalist Paul Cahalan has been writing articles about Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo Bay, for the Wandsworth Guardian (in Shaker’s home borough). Shaker, who has a British wife and four British children, continues to be held at Guantánamo, despite being cleared for release in 2007. Shaker’s story features in […]

On Friday, it emerged in a UK court that the Metropolitan Police is investigating allegations that MI5 was complicit in the torture, in US custody in Afghanistan, of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident still held at Guantánamo. In the High Court, Richard Hermer QC, counsel for Aamer, told Mr. Justice Sullivan that Met officers […]